AmiMoJo writes: Reaching herd immunity is "not a possibility" with the current Delta variant, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said. Giving evidence to MPs on Tuesday, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was "mythical." "The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population," he told the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on coronavirus. "The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated. And that does mean that anyone who's still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus ... and we don't have anything that will [completely] stop that transmission."

Although the existing vaccines are very effective at preventing serious Covid illness and death, they do not stop a fully vaccinated person from being infected by the virus that causes Covid-19. The concept of herd or population immunity relies on a large majority of a population gaining immunity -- either through vaccination or previous infection -- which, in turn, provides indirect protection from an infectious disease for the unvaccinated and those who have never been previously infected. Data from a recent React study conducted by Imperial College London suggests that fully vaccinated people aged 18 to 64 have about a 49% lower risk of being infected compared with unvaccinated people. The findings also indicated that fully vaccinated people were about half as likely to test positive after coming into contact with someone who had Covid (3.84%, down from 7.23%).

labloke11 shares a report from Science News: Windbreaks may sound like a counterintuitive idea for boosting the performance of a wind turbine. But physicists report that low walls that block wind could actually help wind farms produce more power. Scientists already knew that the output of a single wind turbine could be improved with a windbreak. While windbreaks slow wind speed close to the ground, above the height of the windbreak, wind speeds actually increase as air rushes over the top. But for large wind farms, there's a drawback. A windbreak's wake slows the flow of air as it travels farther through the rows of turbines. That could suggest that windbreaks would be a wash for wind farms with many turbines.

But by striking a balance between these competing effects, windbreaks placed in front of each turbine can increase power output, new computer simulations suggest. It comes down to the windbreaks' dimensions. Squat, wide barriers are the way to go, according to a simulated wind farm with six rows of turbines. To optimize performance, windbreaks should be a tenth the height of the turbine and at least five times the width of the blades, physicists report July 30 in Physical Review Fluids. Such an arrangement could increase the total power by about 10 percent, the researchers found. That's the equivalent of adding an additional turbine, on average, for every 10 in a wind farm. In the simulations, the wind always came from the same direction, suggesting the technique might be useful in locations where wind tends to blow one way, such as coastal regions. Future studies could investigate how this technique might apply in places where wind direction varies.

omfglearntoplay shares a report from ScienceAlert: According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein's theory of special relativity. It's called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1934, and we have very good reason to believe it would work. But direct observation of the pure phenomenon involving just two photons has remained elusive, mainly because the photons need to be extremely energetic (i.e. gamma rays) and we don't have the technology yet to build a gamma-ray laser. Now, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory say they've found a way around this stumbling block using the facility's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- resulting in a direct observation of the Breit-Wheeler process in action. The research has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Oregon Live: For the next five years, an Oregon high school diploma will be no guarantee that the student who earned it can read, write or do math at a high school level. Gov. Kate Brown had demurred earlier this summer regarding whether she supported the plan passed by the Legislature to drop the requirement that students demonstrate they have achieved those essential skills. But on July 14, the governor signed Senate Bill 744 into law. Through a spokesperson, the governor declined again Friday to comment on the law and why she supported suspending the proficiency requirements. Charles Boyle, the governor's deputy communications director, said the governor's staff notified legislative staff the same day the governor signed the bill.

Boyle said in an emailed statement that suspending the reading, writing and math proficiency requirements while the state develops new graduation standards will benefit "Oregon's Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color." "Leaders from those communities have advocated time and again for equitable graduation standards, along with expanded learning opportunities and supports," Boyle wrote. The requirement that students demonstrate freshman- to sophomore-level skills in reading, writing and, particularly, math led many high schools to create workshop-style courses to help students strengthen their skills and create evidence of mastery. Most of those courses have been discontinued since the skills requirement was paused during the pandemic before lawmakers killed it entirely. The state's four-year graduation rate is 82.6%, up more than 10 points from six years ago. However, it still lags behind the national graduation rate averages, which is 85 percent.

Oregon's graduation rates currently rank nearly last in the country. But it's complicated because states use different methodologies to calculate their graduation rates, making some states appear better than others.

A pretty little white flower that grows near urban centers of the Pacific Northwest turns out to be a killer. NPR reports: The bog-dwelling western false asphodel, Triantha occidentalis, was first described in the scientific literature in 1879. But until now, no one realized that this sweet looking plant used its sticky stem to catch and digest insects, according to researchers who note in their study published Monday that it's the first new carnivorous plant to be discovered in about 20 years. "We had no idea it was carnivorous," says Sean Graham, a botanist with the University of British Columbia. "This was not found in some exotic tropical location, but really right on our doorstep in Vancouver. You could literally walk out from Vancouver to this field site." Fewer than a thousand plant species are carnivorous, and these plants tend to live in places with abundant sun and water, but nutrient-poor soil.

Graham's team was doing an unrelated project on plant genetics and noticed that the western false asphodel had a genetic deletion that's sometimes seen in carnivorous plants. The researchers started to think about the fact that this flower grew in the kind of environment that's home to various other insect-eating plants. "And then they have these sticky stems," says Graham. "So, you know, it was kind of like, hmm, I wonder if this could be a sign that this might be carnivorous."

To see if the plants could actually take in nutrients from insects, researcher Qianshi Lin, now at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, fed fruit flies nitrogen-15 isotopes, so that this nitrogen could be used as a tracker. He then stuck these flies to stems of this plant. Later, an analysis showed that nitrogen from the dead insects was indeed getting into the plants. In fact, Triantha was getting more than half of its nitrogen from prey. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published online Monday, Lin and his colleagues say that this is comparable to what's seen in other carnivorous plants. What's more, the researchers showed that the sticky hairs on the flower stalk produce a digestive enzyme that's known to be used by many carnivorous plants. And when the research team looked at specimens of this plant preserved in herbariums, they found small dead insects stuck to the stems.

SpaceX is acquiring satellite data start-up Swarm Technologies, in a rare deal by Elon Musk's space company that expands the team -- and possibly the technological capabilities -- of its growing Starlink internet service. CNBC reports: Swarm, which has 120 of its tiny SpaceBEE satellites in orbit, reached an agreement with SpaceX on July 16 to merge, according to an Aug. 6 filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The company will become "a direct wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX upon consummation of the Proposed Transaction," Swarm wrote in the filing. Terms and financial details about the deal were not disclosed. Swarm last completed a fundraising round in January 2019 at a $85 million valuation, according to Pitchbook.

The deal marks an uncommon acquisition for SpaceX, which tends to design and build systems in-house. But FCC licenses can be difficult and time-consuming to get approved, and Swarm will transfer control of of its satellite and ground station licenses to SpaceX as part of the deal, according to the filing. "Swarm's services will benefit from the better capitalization and access to resources available to SpaceX, as well as the synergies associated with acquisition by a provider of satellite design, manufacture, and launch services," the filing said. The company noted that the acquisition benefits SpaceX by bringing "access to the intellectual property and expertise developed by the Swarm team."

Hmmmmmm shares a report from The Independent: Scientists in China have developed the hardest and strongest glassy material known so far that can scratch diamond crystals with ease. The researchers, including those from Yanshan University in China, noted that the new material -- tentatively named AM-III -- has "outstanding" mechanical and electronic properties, and could find applications in solar cells due to its "ultra-high" strength and wear resistance. Analysis of the material, published in the journal National Science Review, revealed that its hardness reached 113 gigapascals (GPa) while natural diamond stone usually scores 50 to 70 on the same test.

According to the scientists, AM-III has tunable energy absorption properties comparable to semiconductors commonly used in solar cells such as hydrogenated amorphous silicon films. While in diamond crystals, the organized internal structure of its atoms and molecules contribute to their immense strength and hardness, in AM-III the researchers found that a combination of order and disorder of its molecules give rise to its strange properties. Using fullerenes, which are materials made of hollow football-like arrangements of carbon atoms, the researchers produced different types of glassy materials with varying molecular organization among which AM-III had the highest order of atoms and molecules. Increasing the order further, the scientists observed, could potentially kill the semiconductivity and other properties that required the atoms and molecules to be chaotic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Neural networks can correctly guess a person's race just by looking at their bodily x-rays and researchers have no idea how it can tell. There are biological features that can give clues to a person's ethnicity, like the color of their eyes or skin. But beneath all that, it's difficult for humans to tell. That's not the case for AI algorithms, according to a study that's not yet been peer reviewed. A team of researchers trained five different models on x-rays of different parts of the body, including chest and hands and then labelled each image according to the patient's race. The machine learning systems were then tested on how well they could predict someone's race given just their medical scans. They were surprisingly accurate. The worst performing was able to predict the right answer 80 percent of the time, and the best was able to do this 99 per cent, according to the paper.

"We demonstrate that medical AI systems can easily learn to recognize racial identity in medical images, and that this capability is extremely difficult to isolate or mitigate," the team warns [PDF]. "We strongly recommend that all developers, regulators, and users who are involved with medical image analysis consider the use of deep learning models with extreme caution. In the setting of x-ray and CT imaging data, patient racial identity is readily learnable from the image data alone, generalizes to new settings, and may provide a direct mechanism to perpetuate or even worsen the racial disparities that exist in current medical practice."

JoshuaZ writes: As the world battles historic droughts, landscape-altering wildfires and deadly floods, a landmark report from global scientists says the window is rapidly closing to cut our reliance on fossil fuels and avoid catastrophic changes that would transform life as we know it. The state-of-the-science report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world has rapidly warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, and is now careening toward 1.5 degrees -- a critical threshold that world leaders agreed warming should remain below to avoid worsening impacts.

Only by making deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, while also removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, can we halt the precipitous trend. "Bottom line is that we have zero years left to avoid dangerous climate change, because it's here," Michael E. Mann, a lead author of the IPCC's 2001 report, told CNN. Unlike previous assessments, Monday's report concludes it is "unequivocal" that humans have caused the climate crisis and confirms that "widespread and rapid changes" have already occurred, some of them irreversibly.

That is due in part to the breakneck pace at which the planet has been recently warming, faster than scientists have previously observed. Since 2018, when the panel published a special report on the significance of 1.5-degrees, greenhouse gas emissions have continued mostly unabated and have pushed global temperatures higher. Even under the IPCC's most optimistic scenario, in which the world's emissions begin to drop sharply today and are reduced to net zero by 2050, global temperature will still peak above the 1.5-degree threshold before falling. In a statement, UN Secretary-General Antanio Guterres called the report "a code red for humanity," and noted the 1.5-degree threshold is "perilously close." "The only way to prevent exceeding this threshold is by urgently stepping up our efforts, and pursuing the most ambitious path," Guterres said.

The UK's leading funding agency has announced that all research it funds must be freely available for anyone to read.

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shared this report from Science: The policy by the funder, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will expand on existing rules covering all research papers produced from its £8 billion in annual funding... About three-quarters of papers recently published from U.K. universities are open access, and UKRI's current policy gives scholars two routes to comply: Pay journals for "gold" open access, which makes a paper free to read on the publisher's website, or choose the "green" route, which allows them to deposit a near-final version of the paper on a public repository, after a waiting period of up to 1 year.

Publishers have insisted that an embargo period is necessary to prevent the free papers from peeling away their subscribers. But starting in April 2022, that yearlong delay will no longer be permitted.
The funder's executive champion for open research succinctly explained their rationale.

"Publicly funded research should be available for public use by the taxpayer."

"Part of the reason that misinformation about vaccines is so intractable is that it can be very lucrative," argues a new article in Slate: For years anti-vaccine figures have made money publishing books and giving speeches, and only in the past couple of years have major sites like YouTube started preventing anti-vaxxers from directly earning revenue from advertising. During the pandemic, as the coronavirus created new markets for health hoaxes, conspiracy theorists have been able to make money online by using the misinformation that they publicize on major sites like Facebook to sell supplements and books to followers via e-commerce shops. Now, vaccine skeptics with large followings are turning to crowdfunding platforms — both the relatively obscure GiveSendGo and the decidedly mainstream GoFundMe — to monetize their activities, often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars...

On GiveSendGo and GoFundMe, vaccine truthers often portray themselves as little guys in a fight against the pro-vaccine tyranny of big pharma, big tech, and big government, and in doing so rake in money from thousands of sympathetic donors. They're able to do it in part because of lax standards and moderation blind spots, and in part by operating in gray areas... Over the past few months, GiveSendGo has been hosting fundraisers for causes casting doubt on vaccines that have racked up huge sums... But it isn't just GiveSendGo, though, that's facilitating donations for efforts to resist coronavirus vaccines. GoFundMe is also providing services to these causes. There, however, skeptics have a workaround: They're not raising money to oppose vaccines, per se, but to oppose vaccine mandates... [T]here are numerous other GoFundMe campaigns to support people who are choosing to leave their jobs instead of getting the vaccine.

GoFundMe does, however, appear to be placing banners with links to information from the CDC and WHO on fundraising pages that promote vaccine hesitancy, unlike GiveSendGo. "Fundraisers raising money to promote misinformation about vaccines violate GoFundMe's terms of service and will be removed from the platform," GoFundMe's senior communication manager Monica Corbett wrote in an email. "Over the last several years, we have removed over 250 fundraisers attempting to promote misinformation related to vaccines. Fundraisers for legal challenges do not violate our terms of service...." As the Daily Beast reported, users have in the past found ways to get around GoFundMe's ban on vaccine misinformation by crafting their campaigns in the name of anti-vax dog whistles like "medical freedom" and "informed consent...."

[T]he platform has tried to crack down on vaccine misinformation, finding itself walking the content-moderation tightrope that other large social media platforms are familiar with, which inevitably leaves loopholes in place that purveyors of misinformation try to exploit.

Friday a CNN video offered what it calls "an exclusive look into how Space Force is defending America." CNN's Jim Sciutto reported: Inside Mission Control at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, Space Force Guardians, as they're known, fly the nation's missile warning satellites. Using infrared sensors, these satellites, orbiting 22,000 miles above earth, scour the planet 24/7 for missile launches and nuclear detonations.

Lt. Col. Michael Mariner: "We never stop — always vigilant — and we never fail. Because that's how important this mission is to our nation. We provide decision-quality data to tactical war fighters on the ground, to save their lives."

This satellite dish is in touch with missile-warning satellites deployed in what's known as geosynchronous orbit. If those warning satellites detect a launch anywhere on the surface of the planet, it beams that information back down to this ground station instantaneously, at the speed of light. And then Space Force sends that information, that warning, around the world to U.S. forces deployed aboard or here on the U.S. homeland. In January 2020, these satellites sprang into action, detecting multiple missiles from Iran targetting the Al Asad airbase in Iraq. Before those missiles rained down, within minutes Space Force had delivered a lifesaving warning to units on the ground. Space Force specialist Sally Stevens was on duty. "It is lightning fast."

CNN: "Right. And quick enough to take action to protect themselves."

Stevens: "Absolutely. Especially in the Al Asad night. Not very often do we get reminded of where our end data gets to, and that night was a shocking reality."

Missile-warning satellites are just a fraction of the hundreds of U.S. government and commercial satellites monitored and defended by the Guardians of the Space Force today — defended because U.S. adversaries led by Russia and China have deployed weapons to disable or destroy them. Space Force is now an independent branch of the U.S. military due to this alarming new reality. Space, once relatively peaceful territory, is now considered a potential front in any modern war.

Colonel Matthew Holston: "Space is a war-fighting domain. It's the reason that we set up the United States Space Force as a separate service. So each and every day, we're training our operators to deter conflict, but if deterrence fails, to compete and win in space."

The U.S. has far more satellites than any other nation, some 2,500, compared to 431 for China and 168 for Russia. And a whole range of U.S. military technologies depend on them... The danger for the U.S. is that greater dependence on space equals greater vulnerability to attacks in space.

Lt. Col. Michael Mariner: "When you're at the top, the target's on your back. Everybody's shooting for you."

China is launching kidnapper satellites with grappling arms capable of plucking satellites out of orbit. Russia is deploying kamikaze satellites, capable of ramming and destroying U.S. space assets. And Russia now has a new space weapon that Space Force dubs "the nesting doll."

General John W. Raymond, Space Force Chief of Space Operations: "Back in 2017, Russia launched a satellite, and it opened up and another satellite came out, and then it open up and a projectile came out. That projectile is designed to kill U.S. satellites. So in 2019 they did the same thing, but this time they put it up next to one of our satellites. And then we started talking about it."

CNN: "You warned them away?"

Raymond: "We described what is safe and professional behavior. And it's important. Today there's no rules in space. It's the wild, wild west."

Russia and China also have directed-energy weapons, which can damage or disable U.S. satellites from a distance. The age of lasers in space has already arrived. New satellites are being designed with greater maneuverability, shielding to block directed-energy weapons, and resiliency so that losing one or a few does not disable the entire system. Space Force commanders welcome the private sector's entry into space, since it gives more and cheaper options to get into orbit... Raymond: "I would bet on U.S. industry any day. It's a huge advantage that we have."
A CNN article summarizing the report adds that Ameria's adversaries" have already attempted to use space weapons to temporarily disable US satellites, using lasers and directed-energy weapons to blind or 'dazzle' them."

CNN's report concludes that space war "is not science fiction, but a battle already underway today," adding this quote from Space Force Chief of Space Operations, General John W. Raymond. "We would prefer the domain to remain free of conflict. But like in any other domain — like air, land, sea, and now space — we'll be ready to protect and defend."

The New York Times reports on what's apparently a new Russia-aligned disinformation campaign to "undermine the effort to immunize people" — and more. (Alternate URL here) Both Russia and China have worked to promote their own vaccines through messaging that undermines American and European vaccination programs, according to the State Department's Global Engagement Center. But in addition to overt messaging promoting their own vaccines, Moscow has also spread conspiracy theories. Last year, the department began warning about how Russia was using fringe websites to promote doubts around vaccinations... The aim of various Russian groups continues to be to exacerbate tensions in Western societies, a key foreign policy goal of Moscow, according to American officials briefed on the disinformation efforts...

In recent weeks, the nature of Russian disinformation has also begun to shift, some officials and outside experts said. Recent postings spreading false information have suggested that the Biden administration is intent on mandating that Americans get vaccines that are failing against the coronavirus. The campaign also comes as President Biden warned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia last month to rein in ransomware attacks emanating out of Russia and aimed at critical American infrastructure. Though the ransomware attacks are separate from the disinformation campaigns, the warning was the latest effort by United States officials to prod Russia to rein in destructive digital incursions... The Biden administration is actively monitoring Russian misinformation and is trying to counter it by encouraging the public to get vaccinated and promoting the safety and efficacy of Western vaccines, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss potentially sensitive information...

Much of the disinformation efforts are posted on websites with little to no moderation... Measuring the impact of the disinformation efforts is difficult, given the deep divisions over vaccinations that already exist in the United States and Europe; exploiting splits among Americans is a typical Russian tactic.

Even on the hard-right discussion forums, some users have fingered the cartoons as being Russian in origin, though the postings have continued.

Friday the Perseverance rover on Mars made its first attempt to collect a rock sample and seal it in a tube, reports NASA. But unfortunately, the data "indicate that no rock was collected during the initial sampling activity..."

"The sampling process is autonomous from beginning to end," said Jessica Samuels, the surface mission manager for Perseverance at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "One of the steps that occurs after placing a probe into the collection tube is to measure the volume of the sample. The probe did not encounter the expected resistance that would be there if a sample were inside the tube."

The Perseverance mission is assembling a response team to analyze the data. One early step will be to use the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) imager - located at the end of the robotic arm - to take close-up pictures of the borehole. Once the team has a better understanding of what happened, it will be able to ascertain when to schedule the next sample collection attempt. "The initial thinking is that the empty tube is more likely a result of the rock target not reacting the way we expected during coring, and less likely a hardware issue with the Sampling and Caching System," said Jennifer Trosper, project manager for Perseverance at JPL
"Mars keeps surprising us," adds the rover's Twitter feed. "We're working through this new challenge. More to come."

Space.com points out this wasn't a make-or-break moment for the rover, since it's still carrying 42 more sampling tubes. And the plan has always been to leave the sample tubes on the surface of Mars, where they'll be retrieved later by future Mars missions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: Scientists have created key parts of synthetic brain cells that can hold cellular "memories" for milliseconds. The achievement could one day lead to computers that work like the human brain. In the new study, published in the journal Science on Aug. 6, researchers at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, France created a computer model of artificial neurons that could produce the same sort of electrical signals neurons use to transfer information in the brain; by sending ions through thin channels of water to mimic real ion channels, the researchers could produce these electrical spikes. And now, they have even created a physical model incorporating these channels as part of unpublished, ongoing research. At a finer level, the researchers created a system that mimics the process of generating action potentials -- spikes in electrical activity generated by neurons that are the basis of brain activity. To generate an action potential, a neuron starts to let in more positive ions, which are attracted to the negative ions inside of the cell. The electrical potential, or voltage across the cell membrane, causes doorways on the cell called voltage-gated ion channels to open, raising the charge even more before the cell reaches a peak and returns to normal a few milliseconds later. The signal is then transmitted to other cells, enabling information to travel in the brain.

To mimic voltage-gated ion channels, the researchers modeled a thin layer of water between sheets of graphene, which are extremely thin sheets of carbon. The water layers in the simulations were one, two, or three molecules in depth, which the researchers characterized as a quasi-two-dimension slit. [T]he researchers wanted to use this two-dimensional environment because particles tend to react much more strongly in two dimensions than in three, and they exhibit different properties in two dimensions, which the researchers thought might be useful for their experiment. Testing out the model in a computer simulation, the researchers found that when they applied an electric field to the channel, the ions in the water formed worm-like structures. As the team applied a greater electric field in the simulation, these structures would break up slowly enough to leave behind a "memory," or a hint of the elongated configuration.

When the researchers ran a simulation linking two channels and other components to mimic the behavior of a neuron, they found the model could generate spikes in electrical activity like action potentials, and that it "remembered" consistent properties in two different states -- one where ions conducted more electricity and one where they conducted less. In this simulation, the "memory" of the previous state of the ions lasted a few milliseconds, around the same time as it takes real neurons to produce an action potential and return to a resting state. This is quite a long time for ions, which usually operate on timescales of nanoseconds or less. In a real neuron, an action potential equates to a cellular memory in the neuron; our brains use the opening and closing of ion channels to create this kind of memory. The new model is a version of an electronic component called a memristor, or a memory resistor, which has the unique property of retaining information from its history. But existing memristors don't use liquid, as the brain does.

After a successful sub-orbital test flight last month, Virgin Galactic re-opened ticket sales for rides to space starting at $450,000 per seat. CBS News reports: But Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic, said fully commercial flights are not expected until the third quarter of 2022, after two more test flights of the company's VSS Unity spaceplane and extensive upgrades of Virgin's Eve carrier jet to improve durability and turnaround times between flights. While the start of commercial operations will come a few months later than had been hoped, the results of two piloted test flights earlier this year, including Branson's July 11 trip to space, show the company is close to "completing our test flight program and launching commercial passenger service in '22," Colglazier said. "And as we advance towards that goal, we are excited to announce today that we will immediately open ticket sales to our significant list of early hand raisers, prioritizing our spacefarer community who, as promised, will be given first opportunity to reserve their place to space."

He said Virgin has developed a "purposeful range of product offerings in order to satisfy the different ways people were want to share this experience." "For the private astronaut flights, our products will include a single seat, a multi-seat couples, families and friends package and a full-flight buyout," he said. "Prices for this next phase of private astronaut sales will begin at $450,000 per seat. Microgravity research and professional astronaut training flights remain priced at $600,000 on a per seat equivalent basis." More than 600 space enthusiasts made down payments on flights much earlier in the program, back when tickets were thought to be in the neighborhood of $250,000 per seat. The prices announced Thursday presumably will apply to new customers only.

Elon Musk's SpaceX stacked a Starship prototype rocket on top of a Super Heavy rocket booster for the first time on Friday morning, giving a look at the scale of the combined nearly 400-foot-tall vehicle. From a report: Musk, asked by CNBC what he thought of witnessing the milestone at the company's facility in Boca Chica, Texas, responded simply. "Dream come true," Musk replied in a tweet.

SpaceX is developing Starship to launch cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars. Starship prototypes stand at about 160 feet tall, or around the size of a 16-story building, and are built of stainless steel -- representing the early version of the rocket that Musk unveiled in 2019. The rocket lifts off on top of a Super Heavy booster, which makes up the bottom half of the rocket and stands about 230 feet tall. Together, Starship and Super Heavy are nearly 400 feet tall when stacked for launch.

Moderna says it expects people who received its two-dose Covid-19 vaccine to need a booster shot in the fall [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] to keep strong protection against newer variants of the coronavirus. From a report: The company said its vaccine remains 90% effective against preventing Covid-19 disease for at least six months, but said it sees a decline in antibody levels after six months, especially against newer strains of the coronavirus including the Delta variant. In a Phase 2 study, a third shot of the original formulation showed robust antibody responses against Covid-19 variants of concern, Moderna said. Moderna Chief Executive Stephane Bancel said in an interview Thursday that the company plans to seek regulatory approval for its booster shots in September, after it analyzes data from ongoing trials.

He said the boosters are necessary because immunity will continue to wane over time and some vaccine recipients show a drop in neutralizing antibodies when exposed to some variants, including Delta. "We're playing it safe, not only for Delta but also for what's coming after," he said. "I don't think the virus is done." Moderna, whose vaccine was authorized for emergency use in December, said Thursday it intends to complete in August its submission to the Food and Drug Administration for full approval of its shot. Its larger rival Pfizer completed its submission in July and the FDA aims to approve it by next month. FDA officials say the vaccines are safe but acknowledge full approval could help combat vaccine hesitancy and ease the way for vaccine mandates as cases in the U.S. fueled by the Delta variant surge.

Terry Rudolph, a professor of quantum physics at Imperial College London, suggests that interstellar light could actually be harnessed by space faring aliens to form an encrypted quantum internet. Motherboard reports: This may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but Rudolph says it was actually a natural extension of what he does as co-founder of PsiQuantum, a Silicon Valley-based company on a mission to build a scalable photonic quantum computer. He laid out his idea in a paper recently published on the arXiv preprint server. Rudolph said the idea for the paper on aliens communicating with quantum starlight flowed from his work on quantum computers. Unlike the quantum computers being pursued by the likes of Google or Intel that use superconducting circuits or trapped ions at incredibly cold temperatures to create qubits (the quantum equivalent of a computer bit), photonic computers use light to accomplish the same thing. While Rudolph says this kind of quantum design is unconventional, it does also have advantages over its rival -- including being able to operate at room temperature and easy integration into existing fiber optic infrastructure.

The primary way the aliens would create this kind of quantum internet is through a quantum mechanics principle called entanglement, explains Rudolph. In a nutshell, entanglement is a phenomena in which the quantum states of particles (like photons) are linked together. This is what Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance" and means that disturbing one particle will automatically affect its partner, even if they're miles apart. This entanglement would allow aliens -- or even humans -- to send encrypted signals between entangled partners, or nodes. Now, scale that single computer system up to a network potentially spanning the entire cosmos.

Aliens aside, Rudolph says that his paper demonstrates that building a photon-based quantum internet here on Earth might be "much easier than we expected." As for the aliens, even if they were using this kind of technology to transform waves of light into their own personal chat rooms, we'd have no way of knowing, says Rudolph. And even if we could pick out these light patterns in the sky, we still wouldn't be able to listen in. This is due to the incredibly shy nature of quantum particles -- any attempt to observe them by an outside party would alter their state and destroy the information they were carrying.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have linked together, or "entangled," the mechanical motion and electronic properties of a tiny blue crystal, giving it a quantum edge in measuring electric fields with record sensitivity that may enhance understanding of the universe. The quantum sensor consists of 150 beryllium ions (electrically charged atoms) confined in a magnetic field, so they self-arrange into a flat 2D crystal just 200 millionths of a meter in diameter. Quantum sensors such as this have the potential to detect signals from dark matter -- a mysterious substance that might turn out to be, among other theories, subatomic particles that interact with normal matter through a weak electromagnetic field. The presence of dark matter could cause the crystal to wiggle in telltale ways, revealed by collective changes among the crystal's ions in one of their electronic properties, known as spin.

As described in the Aug. 6 issue of Science, researchers can measure the vibrational excitation of the crystal -- the flat plane moving up and down like the head of a drum -- by monitoring changes in the collective spin. Measuring the spin indicates the extent of the vibrational excitation, referred to as displacement. This sensor can measure external electric fields that have the same vibration frequency as the crystal with more than 10 times the sensitivity of any previously demonstrated atomic sensor. (Technically, the sensor can measure 240 nanovolts per meter in one second.) In the experiments, researchers apply a weak electric field to excite and test the crystal sensor. A dark matter search would look for such a signal.