Amazing Science

Researchers using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have observed an extreme planet where they suspect it rains iron. The ultra-hot giant exoplanet has a day side where temperatures climb above 2400 degrees Celsius, high enough to vaporize metals. Strong winds carry iron vapor to the cooler night side where it condenses into iron droplets.

"One could say that this planet gets rainy in the evening, except it rains iron," says David Ehrenreich, a professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He led a study, published today in the journal Nature, of this exotic exoplanet. Known as WASP-76b, it is located some 640 light-years away in the constellation of Pisces.

This strange phenomenon happens because the 'iron rain' planet only ever shows one face, its day side, to its parent star, its cooler night side remaining in perpetual darkness. Like the Moon on its orbit around the Earth, WASP-76b is 'tidally locked': it takes as long to rotate around its axis as it does to go around the star.

On its day side, it receives thousands of times more radiation from its parent star than the Earth does from the Sun. It's so hot that molecules separate into atoms, and metals like iron evaporate into the atmosphere. The extreme temperature difference between the day and night sides results in vigorous winds that bring the iron vapor from the ultra-hot day side to the cooler night side, where temperatures decrease to around 1500 degrees Celsius.

Not only does WASP-76b have different day-night temperatures, it also has distinct day-night chemistry, according to the new study. Using the new ESPRESSO instrument on ESO's VLT in the Chilean Atacama Desert, the astronomers identified for the first time chemical variations on an ultra-hot gas giant planet. They detected a strong signature of iron vapor at the evening border that separates the planet's day side from its night side.

"Surprisingly, however, we do not see the iron vapor in the morning," says Ehrenreich. The reason, he says, is that "it is raining iron on the night side of this extreme exoplanet."

"The observations show that iron vapor is abundant in the atmosphere of the hot day side of WASP-76b," adds María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, an astrophysicist at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, and the chair of the ESPRESSO science team. "A fraction of this iron is injected into the night side owing to the planet's rotation and atmospheric winds. There, the iron encounters much cooler environments, condenses and rains down."

The concept of nuclear winter -- a years-long planetary freeze brought on by airborne soot generated by nuclear bombs -- has been around for decades. But such speculations have been based largely on back-of-the-envelope calculations involving a total war between Russia and the United States. Now, a new multinational study incorporating the latest models of global climate, crop production and trade examines the possible effects of a less gargantuan but perhaps more likely exchange between two longtime nuclear-armed enemies: India and Pakistan. It suggests that even a limited war between the two would cause unprecedented planet-wide food shortages and probable starvation lasting more than a decade. The study appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Of an estimated 14,000 nuclear warheads worldwide, close to 95 percent belong to the United States and Russia. India and Pakistan are thought to have about 150 each. The study examines the potential effects if they were to each set off 50 Hiroshima-size bombs -- less than 1 percent of the estimated world arsenal. In addition to direct death and destruction, the authors say that firestorms following the bombings would launch some 5 million tons of soot toward the stratosphere. There, it would spread globally and remain, absorbing sunlight and lowering global mean temperatures by about 1.8 degrees C (3.25 F) for at least five years. The scientists project that this would in turn cause production of the world's four main cereal crops -- maize, wheat, soybeans and rice -- to plummet an average 11 percent over that period, with tapering effects lasting another five to 10 years.

"Even this regional, limited war would have devastating indirect implications worldwide," said Jonas Jägermeyr, a postdoctoral scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies who led the study. "It would exceed the largest famine in documented history."

According to the study, crops would be hardest hit in the northerly breadbasket regions of the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia and China. But paradoxically, southerly regions would suffer much more hunger. That is because many developed nations in the north produce huge surpluses, which are largely exported to nations in the Global South that are barely able to feed themselves. If these surpluses were to dry up, the effects would ripple out through the global trade system. The authors estimate that some 70 largely poor countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people would then see food supplies drop more than 20 percent.

Some adverse effects on crops would come from shifts in precipitation and solar radiation, but the great majority would stem from drops in temperature, according to the study. Crops would suffer most in countries north of 30 degrees simply because temperatures there are lower and growing seasons shorter to begin with. Even modest declines in growing-season warmth could leave crops struggling to mature, and susceptible to deadly cold snaps. As a result, harvests of maize, the world's main cereal crop, could drop by nearly 20 percent in the United States, and an astonishing 50 percent in Russia. Wheat and soybeans, the second and third most important cereals, would also see steep declines.

In southerly latitudes, rice might not suffer as badly, and cooler temperatures might even increase maize harvests in parts of South America and Africa. But this would do little to offset the much larger declines in other regions, according to the study. Since many developed countries produce surpluses for export, their excess production and reserves might tide them over for at least a few years before shortages set in. But this would come at the expense of countries in the Global South. Developed nations almost certainly would impose export bans in order to protect their own populations, and by year four or five, many nations that today already struggle with malnutrition would see catastrophic drops in food availability.

In a study of epilepsy patients, researchers at the National Institutes of Health monitored the electrical activity of thousands of individual brain cells, called neurons, as patients took memory tests. They found that the firing patterns of the cells that occurred when patients learned a word pair were replayed fractions of a second before they successfully remembered the pair. The study was part of an NIH Clinical Center trial for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy whose seizures cannot be controlled with drugs.

"Memory plays a crucial role in our lives. Just as musical notes are recorded as grooves on a record, it appears that our brains store memories in neural firing patterns that can be replayed over and over again," said Kareem Zaghloul, M.D., Ph.D., a neurosurgeon-researcher at the NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and senior author of the study published in Science.

Dr. Zaghloul's team has been recording electrical currents of drug-resistant epilepsy patients temporarily living with surgically implanted electrodes designed to monitor brain activity in the hopes of identifying the source of a patient's seizures. This period also provides an opportunity to study neural activity during memory. In this study, his team examined the activity used to store memories of our past experiences, which scientists call episodic memories.

In 1957, the case of an epilepsy patient H.M. provided a breakthrough in memory research. H.M could not remember new experiences after part of his brain was surgically removed to stop his seizures. Since then, research has pointed to the idea that episodic memories are stored, or encoded, as neural activity patterns that our brains replay when triggered by such things as the whiff of a familiar scent or the riff of a catchy tune. But exactly how this happens was unknown.

Over the past two decades, rodent studies have suggested that the brain may store memories in unique neuronal firing sequences. After joining Dr. Zaghloul's lab, Alex P. Vaz, B.S., an M.D., Ph.D. student at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and the leader of this study decided to test this idea in humans. "We thought that if we looked carefully at the data we had been collecting from patients we might be able to find a link between memory and neuronal firing patterns in humans that is similar to that seen in rodents," said Vaz, a bioengineer who specializes in deciphering the meaning of electrical signals generated by the body.

In order to do this they analyzed the firing patterns of individual neurons located in the anterior temporal lobe, a brain language center. Currents were recorded as patients sat in front of a screen and were asked to learn word pairs such as "cake" and "fox." The researchers discovered that unique firing patterns of individual neurons were associated with learning each new word pattern. Later, when a patient was shown one of the words, such as "cake," a very similar firing pattern was replayed just milliseconds before the patient correctly recalled the paired word "fox."

"These results suggest that our brains may use distinct sequences of neural spiking activity to store memories and then replay them when we remember a past experience," said Dr. Zaghloul.

How are we able to find things in the dark? And how can we imagine how something feels just by looking at it? It is because our brain is able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved by different senses. This multi-sensory integration allows us to form mental images of the world and underpins our conscious awareness. It turns out that the ability to recognize objects across different senses is present in the tiny brains of an insect.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Macquarie University in Sydney have published new work in the journal Science showing that bumblebees can also find objects in the dark they've only seen before. In the light, but barred from touching the objects, bumblebees were trained to find rewarding sugar water in one type of object (cubes or spheres) and bitter quinine solution in the other shape.

When tested in the dark, bees preferred the object that was previously rewarding, spending more time exploring them. Bumblebees also solved the task the other way around. After bees learned to find a particular shape in the dark, they were tested in the light and again preferred the shape they had learned was rewarding by touch alone.

When a gigantic asteroid struck the Earth some 66 million years ago, it triggered an “impact winter” that extinguished over 75 percent of all species on Earth. New research suggests it was the resulting low light, and not frigid temperatures, that drove this horrific mass extinction.

The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction event was so bad that no terrestrial species larger than a rat managed to survive—and it stayed that way for hundreds of thousands of years. It was the resulting impact winter that did the damage, as the atmosphere became inundated with dust, sulfuric compounds, and soot, which caused low temperatures and a dramatic lack of sunlight.

As to which factor—the low light or low temperatures—contributed the most to the impact winter and the ensuing mass extinction is a matter of debate. New research published in Geophysical Research Letters attributes the low light—as caused by excessive soot in the atmosphere—as the primary factor. The new paper was co-authored by geoscientist Clay Tabor from the University of Connecticut, and his colleagues from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

For the study, the researchers ran multiple simulations showing how the Earth’s climate reacted to the dramatic addition of all that stuff in the atmosphere. When the asteroid struck, it spewed an unspeakable amount of molten material into the sky, which fell down as fiery rain across much of the globe. This kindled massive wildfires around the world, the byproduct of which was soot, and lots of it. As for the dust and sulfates, those elements came from the collision itself (asteroids are packed with sulfur). To create the simulations, the researchers used the Community Earth System Model (DESM) which is “able to accurately simulate present‐day climate and has been widely used for paleoclimate applications,” according to the study.

Consistent with other research, the models showed that the reduced sunlight caused global cooling at the Earth’s surface. Yes, this cooling was bad, the researchers admit, but not enough to tip the scales towards a mass extinction.

As for the low light impacting on the Earth’s biosphere, that’s another story. According to the models, the soot hung out in the atmosphere for a protracted period of time. And unlike dust and sulfur, soot sucks up the Sun’s life-giving rays like a sponge.

No matter if you enjoy taking or just watching images of space, NASA has a treat for you. They have made their entire collection of images, sounds, and video available and publicly searchable online. It’s 140,000 photos and other resources available for you to see, or even download and use it any way you like.

You can type in the term you want to search for and browse through the database of stunning images of outer space. Additionally, there are also images of astronauts, rocket launches, events at NASA and other interesting stuff. What’s also interesting is that almost every image comes with the EXIF data, which could be useful for astrophotography enthusiasts.

NASA recently launched a GIPHY account full of awesome animated gifs. It’s also great that photography is an important part of their missions, and so it was even before “pics or it didn’t happen” became the rule. The vast media library they have now published is available to everyone, free of charge and free of copyright. Therefore, you can take a peek at the fascinating mysteries of space, check out what it’s like inside NASA’s premises, or download the images to make something awesome from them. Either way, you will enjoy it!

The world’s hardest-hit countries are trying a variety of measures to stop the spread of the virus. Here’s how they’re doing.

Milan, Italy. Daegu, South Korea. Qom, Iran. Many of the world’s largest coronavirus outbreaks took root in and around well-traveled cities, but they have since grown to encompass entire countries. Cases have spread across Italy’s north and down to Rome, leading to a lockdown of the entire country. Iran’s capital, where leaders dismissed the virus just two weeks ago, has seen thousands infected. And cases continue to surge across Europe.

The outbreaks are not all heading in the same direction. South Korea has managed to slow growth of new cases for now, through intensive testing and monitoring of infections. Italy, Iran and the United States are still reporting large numbers of new cases every day.

Official case totals are an imperfect method of judging the world’s outbreaks. Every country has more cases than it has been able to detect through lab tests. And a shortage of testing kits in some countries, like Indonesia and the United States, along with a lack of public disclosure in others, like Egypt, means official reports are probably masking large outbreaks.

Here’s the extent of some of the largest outbreaks in the world and information on how these countries are trying to slow the spread of the virus.

It is a data scientist's job to understand how to analyze and interpret data. When they analyze the data around covid-19, they were very concerned. The most vulnerable parts of society, the elderly and the poor, are most at risk, but controlling the spread and impact of the disease requires us all to change our behavior.

Wash your hands thoroughly and regularly, avoid groups and crowds, cancel events, and don’t touch your face. In this post, data scientists explain why they are concerned, and you should be too.

For an excellent summary of the key information you need to know, read Corona in Brief by Ethan Alley (the president of a non-profit that develops technologies to reduce risks from pandemics).

Doctors used CRISPR to edit genes of cells inside a patient's eye, hoping to restore vision to a person blinded by a rare genetic disorder. A similar strategy might work for some brain diseases.

For the first time, scientists have used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to try to edit a gene while the DNA is still inside a person's body. The groundbreaking procedure involved injecting the microscopic gene-editing tool into the eye of a patient blinded by a rare genetic disorder, in hopes of enabling the volunteer to see. They hope to know within weeks whether the approach is working and, if so, to know within two or three months how much vision will be restored.

"We're really excited about this," says Dr. Eric Pierce, a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Inherited Retinal Disorders Service at Massachusetts Eye and Ear. Pierce is leading a study that the procedure launched. "We're helping open, potentially, an era of gene-editing for therapeutic use that could have impact in many aspects of medicine," Pierce tells NPR.

The CRISPR gene-editing technique has been revolutionizing scientific research by making it much easier to rewrite the genetic code. It's also raising high hopes of curing many diseases. Before this step, doctors had only used CRISPR to try to treat a small number of patients who have cancer, or the rare blood disorders sickle cell anemia or beta-thalassemia. While some of the initial results have been promising, it's still too soon to know whether the strategy is working.

In those other cases, doctors removed cells from patients' bodies, edited genes in the cells with CRISPR in the lab and then infused the modified cells back into the volunteers' bodies to either attack their cancer or produce a protein their bodies are missing.

In this new experiment, doctors at the Casey Eye Institute in Portland, Ore., injected (into the eye of a patient who is nearly blind from a condition called Leber congenital amaurosis) microscopic droplets carrying a harmless virus that had been engineered to deliver the instructions to manufacture the CRISPR gene-editing machinery.

A new AI-powered diagnosis system promises to detect new coronavirus cases with an accuracy rate of up to 96% via computerized tomography scans, Chinese tech outlet Sina Tech News reported. The diagnosis algorithm was developed by Alibaba's research institute Damo Academy. Researchers at the academy said they had trained the AI model with sample data from more than 5,000 confirmed cases, adding that the system could identify differences in CT scans between patients infected with the novel virus and those with ordinary viral pneumonia with an accuracy of up to 96%. The algorithm included the latest treatment guidelines and recently published research, said its creators.

The new diagnostic tool was first introduced in the new Qiboshan Hospital in Zhengzhou, Henan province, which was modeled on Beijing's Xiaotangshan Hospital, completed in 2003 to deal with the SARS crisis. The new hospital started accepting patients infected with coronavirus on Sunday.

The system would also be adopted in more than 100 hospitals in the provinces of Hubei, Guangdong and Anhui, said Alibaba. The new algorithm could alleviate pressure on hospitals, as it can complete the recognition process within 20 seconds, according to Alibaba. Usually, it will take a doctor between five and 15 minutes to analyze a CT scan of one suspected patient and give a clinical diagnosis, with scans sometimes including more than 300 images.

The Chinese National Health Commission on Feb. 5 widened the criteria for the diagnosis of new infections, adding CT scan results on top of the previous nucleic acid test method, to ensure patients with clinical symptoms will receive standard treatment as soon as possible.

This new diagnosis system is not Alibaba's first attempt to use AI to combat coronavirus. Researchers from Damo Academy have developed an AI-powered public health service tool that provides information related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which was first deployed by the government of Zhejiang province on Jan. 27. The system can answer most inquiries regarding the pandemic via an app.

Lithium prices have soared as battery-dependent industries like electric vehicles and renewable energy have entered a renaissance.

As the name suggestions, lithium is an essential material used in lithium-ion batteries, which play an increasingly important role in areas like electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. The growth of these industries and their dependence on batteries is driving unprecedented demand for lithium, causing lithium miners and battery producers to rapidly scale operations. Despite the excitement around this natural resource, lithium contracts do not trade transparently on futures markets (like gold or oil), and therefore finding information and investing in the metal can be more nuanced than with other commodities.

The following analysis seeks to shed light on lithium by answering six questions:

1. What is lithium and how is it used?
2. What is driving lithium demand?
3. What is the impact of the growth of battery megafactories in lithium?
4. Where does lithium come from and how is it mined?
5. What are the potential future prospects for lithium?
6. How can one invest in lithium?

Genetic sequences of viruses isolated from the scaly animals are 99% similar to that of the circulating virus — but the work is yet to be formally published.

Previously, researchers have noted that coronaviruses are a possible cause of death in pangolins1, and that nCoV-2019 and coronaviruses from pangolins use receptors with similar molecular structures to infect cells.

Even before today’s announcement, pangolins were a good candidate for being an intermediate species for the virus, so it’s very interesting that the researchers have found such a close sequence, says David Robertson, a computational virologist at the University of Glasgow, UK.

Pangolins are protected animals, but illegal trafficking is widespread, and some species are critically endangered. They are sold, controversially, for their meat and scales, and for use in traditional Chinese medicine, in which parts of the animal are used to treat ailments such as skin diseases, menstrual disorders and arthritis. Chinese law states that people selling pangolins can be punished by 10 years or more in prison.

The coronavirus emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December, and is thought to have leapt to humans at a seafood and wild-animal market, where many of the first people to become infected worked. Pangolins were not listed on an inventory of items sold at the market — although the illegality of trading pangolins could explain this omission. Last month, scientists in Beijing claimed that snakes were the source of nCoV-2019, but that theory was dismissed by other researchers.

Shen and Xiao did not immediately respond to Nature’s requests for comment, but Liu Yahong, president of the South China Agricultural University, told the press conference that the results would be published soon to help efforts to control the coronavirus.

Scientists hope that the paper will offer details including where the team found the pangolins with the similar virus. Arinjay Banerjee, a coronavirus researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, says that another crucial detail is where in pangolins the researchers found the virus — for example, whether it was isolated from blood samples or rectal swabs. This will help to determine how it might have been passed to humans and how such transmission could be prevented in the future.

“I can definitely believe it could be true,” says Kristian Andersen, an immunologist and computational biologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. Andersen says he has compared publicly available sequences of pangolin viruses and found that they are similar to that of nCoV-2019. “I look forward to the published report and data.”

Astronomers discovered a record-breaking eruption, the largest explosion in the universe since the Big Bang: an explosion to which all others pale by comparison. The blast came from a black hole at the center of a remote galaxy, approximately 390 million light-years away.

Scientists discovered the black hole by using several Earthbound telescopes and observatories. Simona Giacintucci, lead author of the study, stated that the explosion was comparable to how the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 ripped off the top of the mountain in some ways. A significant difference being that one could fit more than ten Milky Way galaxies in a row in the crater that this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas.

Interestingly enough, black holes are mainly known for pulling matter in not blasting it out. In reality, they often discharge immense quantities of energy and matter. This occurs when material falling toward the black hole is redirected into jets or beams, that burst outward into space and crash into any surrounding matter.

The cancer death rate declined by 29% from 1991 to 2017, including a 2.2% drop from 2016 to 2017, the largest single-year drop in cancer mortality ever reported. The news comes from Cancer Statistics, 2020, the latest edition of the American Cancer Society's annual report on cancer rates and trends.

The steady 26-year decline in overall cancer mortality is driven by long-term drops in death rates for the four major cancers -- lung, colorectal, breast, and prostate, although recent trends are mixed. The pace of mortality reductions for lung cancer -- the leading cause of cancer death -- accelerated in recent years (from 2% per year to 4% overall) spurring the record one-year drop in overall cancer mortality. In contrast, progress slowed for colorectal, breast, and prostate cancers. The article appears early online in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, and is accompanied by a consumer version, Cancer Facts & Figures 2020.

Overall cancer death rates dropped by an average of 1.5% per year during the most recent decade of data (2008-2017), continuing a trend that began in the early 1990s and resulting in the 29% drop in cancer mortality in that time. The drop translates to approximately 2.9 million fewer cancer deaths than would have occurred had mortality rates remained at their peak. Continuing declines in cancer mortality contrast with a stable trend for all other causes of death combined, reflecting a slowing decline for heart disease, stabilizing rates for cerebrovascular disease, and an increasing trend for accidents and Alzheimer disease.

Lung cancer death rates have dropped by 51% (since 1990) in men and by 26% (since 2002) in women, with the most rapid progress in recent years. For example, reductions in mortality accelerated from 3% per year during 2008-2013 to 5% per year during 2013-2017 in men and from 2% to almost 4% in women. However, lung cancer still accounts for almost one-quarter of all cancer deaths, more than breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers combined.

The most rapid declines in mortality occurred for melanoma of the skin, on the heels of breakthrough treatments approved in 2011 that pushed one-year survival for patients diagnosed with metastatic disease from 42% during 2008-2010 to 55% during 2013-2015. This progress is likewise reflected in the overall melanoma death rate, which dropped by 7% per year during 2013-2017 in people ages 20 to 64, compared to declines during 2006-2010 (prior to FDA approval of ipilimumab and vemurafenib) of 2%-3% per year in those ages 20 to 49 and 1% per year in those ages 50 to 64. Even more striking are the mortality declines of 5% to 6% in individuals 65 and older, among whom rates were previously increasing.

The novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that emerged in the city of Wuhan, China, last year and has since caused a large scale COVID-19 epidemic and spread to more than 70 other countries is the product of natural evolution, according to findings published today in the journal Nature Medicine.

The analysis of public genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses found no evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered.

"By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes," said Kristian Andersen, PhD, an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research and corresponding author on the paper.

In addition to Andersen, authors on the paper, "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2," include Robert F. Garry, of Tulane University; Edward Holmes, of the University of Sydney; Andrew Rambaut, of University of Edinburgh; W. Ian Lipkin, of Columbia University.

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can cause illnesses ranging widely in severity. The first known severe illness caused by a coronavirus emerged with the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in China. A second outbreak of severe illness began in 2012 in Saudi Arabia with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).

An analysis of publicly available data on infections from the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes the respiratory illness COVID-19 yielded an estimate of 5.1 days for the median disease incubation period, according to a new study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. This median time from exposure to onset of symptoms suggests that the 14-day quarantine period used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for individuals with likely exposure to the coronavirus is reasonable.

The analysis suggests that about 97.5 percent of people who develop symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection will do so within 11.5 days of exposure. The researchers estimated that for every 10,000 individuals quarantined for 14 days, only about 101 would develop symptoms after being released from quarantine.

The findings will be published online March 9 in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. For the study, the researchers analyzed 181 cases from China and other countries that were detected prior to February 24, were reported in the media, and included likely dates of exposure and symptom onset. Most of the cases involved travel to or from Wuhan, China, the city at the center of the epidemic, or exposure to individuals who had been to Hubei, the province for which Wuhan is the capital.

The CDC and many other public health authorities around the world have been using a 14-day quarantine or active-monitoring period for individuals who are known to be at high risk of infection due to contact with known cases or travel to a heavily affected area.

"Based on our analysis of publicly available data, the current recommendation of 14 days for active monitoring or quarantine is reasonable, although with that period some cases would be missed over the long-term," says study senior author Justin Lessler, an associate professor in the Bloomberg School's Department of Epidemiology.

The virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is stable for several hours to days in aerosols and on surfaces, according to a new study from National Institutes of Health, CDC, UCLA and Princeton University scientists in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The scientists found that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was detectable in aerosols for up to three hours, up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel. The results provide key information about the stability of SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19 disease, and suggests that people may acquire the virus through the air and after touching contaminated objects. The study information was widely shared during the past two weeks after the researchers placed the contents on a preprint server to quickly share their data with colleagues.

The NIH scientists, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' Montana facility at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, compared how the environment affects SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1, which causes SARS. SARS-CoV-1, like its successor now circulating across the globe, emerged from China and infected more than 8,000 people in 2002 and 2003. SARS-CoV-1 was eradicated by intensive contact tracing and case isolation measures and no cases have been detected since 2004. SARS-CoV-1 is the human coronavirus most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. In the stability study the two viruses behaved similarly, which unfortunately fails to explain why COVID-19 has become a much larger outbreak.

The NIH study attempted to mimic virus being deposited from an infected person onto everyday surfaces in a household or hospital setting, such as through coughing or touching objects. The scientists then investigated how long the virus remained infectious on these surfaces.

The scientists highlighted additional observations from their study:

Medical authorities in China have said a drug used in Japan to treat new strains of influenza appeared to be effective in coronavirus patients, Japanese media said on Wednesday.

Zhang Xinmin, an official at China’s science and technology ministry, said favipiravir, developed by a subsidiary of Fujifilm, had produced encouraging outcomes in clinical trials in Wuhan and Shenzhen involving 340 patients. “It has a high degree of safety and is clearly effective in treatment,” Zhang told reporters on Tuesday.

Patients who were given the medicine in Shenzhen turned negative for the virus after a median of four days after becoming positive, compared with a median of 11 days for those who were not treated with the drug, public broadcaster NHK said.

In addition, X-rays confirmed improvements in lung condition in about 91% of the patients who were treated with favipiravir, compared to 62% or those without the drug.

People who recover after being infected with the novel coronavirus can still be left with substantially weakened lung capacity, with some left gasping for air when walking quickly, doctors in Hong Kong have found.

The Hong Kong Hospital Authority made the findings after studying the first wave of patients who were discharged from the hospital and had fully recovered from COVID-19.

Out of 12 people in the group, two to three saw changes in their lung capacity. "They gasp if they walk a bit more quickly," Owen Tsang Tak-yin, the medical director of the authority's Infectious Disease Centre, told a press conference Thursday, according to the South China Morning Post. "Some patients might have around a drop of 20 to 30% in lung function" after full recovery, he said. Tsang added, however, that patients can do cardiovascular exercises, like swimming, the improve their lung capacity over time.

While it's too early to establish long-term effects of the disease, scans of nine patients' lungs also "found patterns similar to frosted glass in all of them, suggesting there was organ damage," Tsang said, according to the Post.

Current coronavirus patients' CT scans show "ground glass," a phenomenon in which fluid builds up in lungs and presents itself as white patches, as Business Insider's Aria Bendix has reported. The scans below, taken from one coronavirus patient at different points in time, show that the person's "ground glass" became more pronounced as their illness progressed.

Currently, 69,607 people had recovered from COVID-19 out of 128,392 confirmed cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. More than 4,700 people have died of the disease.

A psychological theory could kickstart improvements in the way robots are able to walk, thanks to a University of Manchester study.

The study - a unique collaboration between a clinical psychologist, robotics engineers and a robotics entrepreneur is published in the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems. It analyzed what happens when standard algorithms driving a self-balancing robot - made from simple Lego - were replaced with those based on ‘perceptual control theory’.

The theory was encoded into the little droid, allowing it to control what it sensed so that it moved around more effectively, just as humans and other animals can. Though the robot moves on two wheels, it is an ‘inverted pendulum’, which requires nimble balancing in a similar way to how our bodies are kept upright when we walk. So, the better the robot can balance, the better prepared it will be for walking like a human.

In the study, the more lifelike robot balanced more accurately, more promptly and more efficiently than its rivals by assessing its environment at least 100 times a second. It also moved to a new location, even when disturbed by sideways nudges, more effectively than its competitors.

Coronavirus can kill, but experts are still puzzling over how deadly the disease it causes truly is. Seoul’s aggressive screening regime might hold the answer.

Most of us, if at all aware of the glorious accident we experience as our own existence, are only dimly aware of it and only as an abstraction. Not so for the great physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson (December 15, 1923–February 28, 2020) — one of the vastest scientific minds of the past century, and one of the most humanistic.

Among physicists, Dyson is known most of all as one of the pioneers of quantum electrodynamics. In the 1920s, physicists had learned to describe ordinary matter via the strange and often counterintuitive theory known as quantum mechanics. Moreover, it was known that light comes in the form of individual particles, or “quanta,” known as photons. But attempts in those days to understand the quantum mechanics of light interacting with matter led to intractable difficulties. 

By the late 1940s, when research in fundamental physics resumed after World War II, advances in technology made it possible to do experiments testing the quantum-mechanical interactions of photons and electrons—creating a compelling need to develop a workable theory. Dyson, along with Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Shinichiro Tomanaga, was one of the pioneers who accomplished this. Very roughly, Dyson's role was to establish a bridge between what had looked like very different and potentially incompatible approaches. In so doing, he introduced ideas and methods that are widely used today. The theory of quantum electrodynamics that he helped establish is the prototype that was eventually elaborated into the Standard Model of particle physics.

In the 1950s, Dyson made multiple important contributions to continue developing the framework of quantum electrodynamics. This work was done at an astonishingly young age. The initial breakthroughs were made in 1948 and 1949; Dyson turned 25 in 1948. Remarkably, by this time he had already established a reputation in a completely different area: the field of mathematics known as Diophantine approximation.

As more employees, educators, and students work remotely in response to the spread of COVID-19, Google wants to do their part to help them stay connected and productive. G Suite and G Suite for Education make up a collection of productivity apps that help businesses and educators collaborate no matter where they’re located.

Google seems committed to helping students and their teachers continue learning outside of school. In Hong Kong and Vietnam, where schools have already been closed, and Google has seen hundreds of thousands of students start using both Hangouts Meet, their video-conferencing tool available to all G Suite users, and Google Classroom, to join classes and continue their schooling remotely from home. And, as more businesses adjust their work-from-home policies and adopt reduced travel plans in response to COVID-19, Google is helping to ensure that all globally distributed teams can still reliably meet face to face, even if employees are not in the same location. 

Starting in March 2020, Google will begin rolling out free access to our advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally including: 

• Larger meetings, for up to 250 participants per call
• Live streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain 
• The ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive

These features are typically available in the Enterprise edition of G Suite and in G Suite Enterprise for Education, and will be available at no additional cost to all customers until July 1, 2020. Whoever needs help getting started should visit Google's learning center page or follow the instructions outlined in message to G Suite admins. 

Google pledged to be committed to supporting their users and customers during this challenging time, and are continuing to scale their infrastructure to support greater Hangouts Meet demand, ensuring streamlined, reliable access to the service throughout this period.

Most technologies are made from steel, concrete, chemicals, and plastics, which degrade over time and can produce harmful ecological and health side effects. It would thus be useful to build technologies using self-renewing and biocompatible materials, of which the ideal candidates are living systems themselves. Thus, scientists have developed a method that designs completely biological machines from the ground up: computers automatically design new machines in simulation, and the best designs are then built by combining together different biological tissues. People may use this approach to design a variety of living machines to safely deliver drugs inside the human body, help with environmental remediation, or further broaden our understanding of the diverse forms and functions life may adopt.