President Biden's surgeon general formally requested that the major tech platforms submit information about the scale of Covid-19 misinformation on social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems. From a report: A request for information from the surgeon general's office demanded that tech platforms send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid-19 misinformation on their sites, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The notice asks the companies to submit "exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of Covid-19 misinformation," as well as aggregate data on demographics that may have been disproportionately exposed to or affected by the misinformation. The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, also demanded information from the platforms about the major sources of Covid-19 misinformation, including those that engaged in the sale of unproven Covid-19 products, services and treatments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the US Air Force Research Laboratory released a video on YouTube that didn't get much attention. But it made an announcement that is fairly significant -- the US military plans to extend its space awareness capabilities beyond geostationary orbit, all the way to the Moon. "Until now, the United States space mission extended 22,000 miles above Earth," a narrator says in the video. "That was then, this is now. The Air Force Research Laboratory is extending that range by 10 times and the operations area of the United States by 1,000 times, taking our reach to the far side of the Moon into cislunar space."

The US military had previously talked about extending its operational domain, but now it is taking action. It plans to launch a satellite, likely equipped with a powerful telescope, into cislunar space. According to the video, the satellite will be called the Cislunar Highway Patrol System or, you guessed it, CHPS. The research laboratory plans to issue a "request for prototype proposals" for the CHPS satellite on March 21 and announce the contract award in July. The CHPS program will be managed by Michael Lopez, from the lab's Space Vehicles Directorate. (Alas, we were rooting for Erik Estrada).

This effort will include the participation of several military organizations, and it can be a little confusing to keep track of. Essentially, though, the Air Force lab will oversee the development of the satellite. The US Space Force will then procure this capability for use by the US Space Command, which is responsible for military operations in outer space. Effectively, this satellite is the beginning of an extension of operations by US Space Command from geostationary space to beyond the Moon. [...] So why is US Space Command interested in expanding its theater of operations to include the Moon? The primary reason cited in the video is managing increasing space traffic in the lunar environment, including several NASA-sponsored commercial missions, the space agency's Artemis program, and those of other nations. Another strategic element includes the ability to detect space objects, such as those placed into cislunar space by other governments, that could swing around the Moon and potentially come back to attack a U.S. military satellite in geostationary space.

"I think that's far fetched, but it is feasible from a physics perspective and would definitely exploit a gap in their current space domain awareness," said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation. "I think they are far more concerned about that than any actual threats in cislunar space because the US doesn't have any military assets in cislunar space right now."

SpaceX launched 47 satellites and landed the returning rocket on Thursday morning (March 3). Space.com reports: A two-stage Falcon 9 rocket carrying 47 Starlink internet satellites launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida Thursday at 9:35 a.m. EST (1435 GMT). About nine minutes later, the Falcon 9's upper stage came back to Earth for a vertical landing on the SpaceX droneship Just Read the Instructions, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles off the Florida coast. The successful landing was the 11th for the booster, tying a SpaceX rocket reuse record. [...] Thursday's launch was the sixth Starlink mission of the year already for SpaceX. You can watch the Falcon 9 launch via NASASpaceflight on YouTube.

Russia has decided to stop supplying rocket engines to the United States in retaliation for its sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. Reuters reports: "In a situation like this we can't supply the United States with our world's best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don't know what," [Dmitry Rogozin, head of the state space agency Roscosmos, said on state Russian television]. According to Rogozin, Russia has delivered a total of 122 RD-180 engines to the U.S. since 1990s, of which 98 have been used to power Atlas launch vehicles. Roscosmos will also stop servicing rocket engines it had previously delivered to the U.S., Rogozin said, adding that the U.S. still had 24 engines that would now be left without Russian technical assistance.

Russia has earlier said it was suspending cooperation with Europe on space launches from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana in response to Western sanctions over Ukraine. Moscow has also demanded guarantees from British satellite company OneWeb that its satellites would not be used for military purposes. OneWeb, in which the British government has a stake, said on Thursday it was suspending all launches from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Rogozin said Russia would now focus on creating dual-purpose spacecraft in line with the needs of Roscosmos and the Defence Ministry.

Researchers have a new view of HR 6819: two stars, one of them a "vampire." From a report: Astronomers who thought they had discovered a black hole on our cosmic doorstep have said they were mistaken, instead revealing they have found a two-star system involving a stellar "vampire." The system, known as HR 6819 in the constellation Telescopium, was in the headlines in 2020 when researchers announced it contained a black hole. At just 1,000 light years from Earth, it was the closest yet found to our planet. At the time the team behind the work said the presence of a black hole was necessary to make sense of the movement of two stars in the system, suggesting a black hole and one star orbited each other while the second star moved in a wider orbit. Now the researchers say they were mistaken: the black hole does not exist.

Dietrich Baade, an emeritus astronomer at European Southern Observatory (ESO) and a co-author of the work, said just one blob of light was previously detected, containing the hallmarks of two stars. Since both stars are of similar brightness and the same age, they would normally have the same mass and would whirl each other around with similar, high velocity. "Since we saw that only one of the stars was whirled around at high velocity by some massive object, which we didn't see, we assumed this unseen massive object to be a third body, namely a black hole," he said.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Physicists in Australia have programmed a quantum computer half a world away to make, or at least simulate, a record-size time crystal -- a system of quantum particles that locks into a perpetual cycle in time, somewhat akin to the repeating spatial pattern of atoms in an actual crystal. The new time crystal comprises 57 quantum particles, more than twice the size of a 20-particle time crystal simulated last year by scientists at Google. That's so big that no conventional computer could simulate it, says Chetan Nayak, a condensed matter physicist at Microsoft, who was not involved in the work. "So that's definitely an important advance." The work shows the power of quantum computers to simulate complex systems that may otherwise exist only in physicists' theories.

[Philipp Frey and Stephan Rachel, theorists at the University of Melbourne] performed the simulation remotely, using quantum computers built and run by IBM in the United States. The qubits, which can be set to 0, 1, or 1 and 0 at once, can be programmed to interact like magnets. For certain settings of their interactions, the researchers found, any initial setting of the 57 qubits, such as 01101101110 ..., remains stable, returning to its original state every two pulses, the researchers report today in Science Advances. [...] Whereas more than 100 researchers worked on the Google simulation, Frey and Rachel worked alone to perform their larger demonstration, submitting it to the IBM computers over the internet. "It was just me, my graduate student, and a laptop," Rachel says, adding that "Philipp is brilliant!" The entire project took about 6 months, he estimates. The demonstration isn't perfect, Rachel says. The flipping pattern ought to last indefinitely, he says, but the qubits in IBM's machines can only hold their states long enough to simulate about 50 cycles. Ultimately, the stabilizing effect of the interactions might be used to store the state of a string of qubits in a kind of memory for a quantum computer, he notes, but realizing such an advance will take -- what else? -- time.

As Ukrainian researchers have feared for their lives and careers after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, mathematicians have been grappling over what to do about a prominent mathematical conference that was set to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in July. From a report: The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is "the largest and most significant conference on pure and applied mathematics as well as one of the world's oldest scientific congresses," according to the Web site of the 2022 conference. The meeting, which is run by the Germany-based International Mathematical Union (IMU), is held only once every four years. When the nine-day 2018 ICM was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, it drew 10,506 attendees.

On Saturday conference organizers announced the event would be fully virtual and hosted outside of Russia this year. The executive committee of the meeting released a statement saying, "We strongly condemn the actions by Russia. Our deepest sympathy goes to our Ukrainian colleagues and the Ukrainian people. Given this situation, it is impossible for the IMU to host the ICM and the GA [general assembly] as traditional in-person events in Russia." The Fields Medal -- one of the most prestigious honors in mathematics -- is traditionally awarded at the event. According to the recent decision, this year's prize ceremony and general assembly will be held in person but at an undecided location outside of Russia.

Most people know someone who has stubbornly resisted catching Covid, despite everyone around them falling sick. Precisely how they do this remains a mystery, but scientists are beginning to find some clues. From a report: The hope is that identifying these mechanisms could lead to the development of drugs that not only protect people from catching Covid, but also prevent them from passing it on. Phoebe Garrett is not the only challenge trial participant to have avoided becoming infected. Of the 34 who were exposed to the virus, 16 failed to develop an infection (defined as two consecutive positive PCR tests) -- although around half of them transiently tested positive for low levels of the virus, often several days after exposure.

Possibly, this was a reflection of the immune system rapidly shutting down an embryonic infection. "In our previous studies with other viruses, we have seen early immune responses in the nose that are associated with resisting infection," said Prof Christopher Chiu at Imperial College London, who led the study. "Together, these findings imply that there is a struggle between the virus and host, which in our 'uninfected' participants results in prevention of infection taking off." Some of them also reported some mild symptoms, such as a stuffy nose, sore throat, tiredness, or headache -- although, since these commonly occur in everyday life, they may have been unrelated to virus exposure.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times, written by Wudan Yan: Kristin Aquilino, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, knows that expectations are just disappointments in disguise. Over the last decade, she has led the school's white abalone captive breeding program, which aims to bring the marine mollusk back from the brink of extinction. Last June, she and her colleagues drove snails kept in captivity at Davis down the California coast to Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in Los Angeles. Others were dropped off at labs and aquariums around Southern California; all told, this was the largest spawning attempt of white abalone to date. But when she tried to get them in the mood with what she calls a love potion -- a mix of seawater with hydrogen peroxide -- the snails languished in their tanks occasionally emitting bubbles, but no eggs or sperm. After four hours, Dr. Aquilino called it off. (Simultaneous attempts at the other sites also failed.) "It sucks," she said. "There's a lot of human effort involved, but there's no way they'll spawn today."

After fishermen depleted 99 percent of white abalone from the wild in the 1970s, the sea snails are hanging on by a slimy thread. Despite the urgency of breeding these and other endangered aquatic snails to reintroduce to the wild, propagating more of them in a lab is still a guessing game, Dr. Aquilino says. Now, a study published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science offers an improved tool for determining which abalone will be reproductive. The technique, using noninvasive ultrasound, a decades-old medical technology, could raise the prospects of successful captive breeding efforts and ultimately help restore endangered abalone in the wild. [...] For Dr. Aquilino, the method offers a glimmer of hope. "When I first saw the ultrasound images of my kids, I saw the future of my family," she said. "When I see the ultrasound images of these abalone, I see the future of an entire species." [...]

Sara Boles, a postdoctoral researcher working with Dr. Gross, discovered a way to perform ultrasounds on the abalone without taking them out of their tanks by holding the device up to their sticky feet. This quickly produced clear images of their swollen or flaccid gonads on a laptop appended to the ultrasound probe. In the new study, Dr. Boles and her colleagues examined over 200 abalone and scored the thickness of their gonads on a scale of 1 to 5 to determine which are likely to spawn. With the ultrasound images, the gonad comes into focus: The stomach appears as a dark, cone-shaped item, and the slightly lighter gonad surrounds it. For now, these images can provide an easy way to score animals, but Dr. Gross and his colleagues want to verify if gonad thickness also correlates with reproductive success. Already, Dr. Boles has used the ultrasound to help Dr. Aquilino in her white abalone breeding efforts. Last spring, after Dr. Aquilino had already visually scored the animals, Dr. Boles brought the ultrasound to her lab. Of the eight white abalone that Dr. Boles rated highest after the ultrasound exam, five spawned; some snails with slightly lower ratings did, too. The method is already helping researchers revise their methods of assessing which abalone are most ready to reproduce.

By combining CRISPR technology with a protein designed with artificial intelligence, it is possible to awaken individual dormant genes by disabling the chemical "off switches" that silence them. Researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle describe this finding in the journal Cell Reports. Phys.Org reports: The new technique controls gene activity without altering the DNA sequence of the genome by targeting chemical modifications that help package genes in our chromosomes and regulate their activity. Because these modifications occur not in, but on top of genes, they are called epigenetic, from the Greek epi "over" or "above" the genes. The chemical modifications that regulate gene activity are called epigenetic markers. Scientists are particularly interested in epigenetic modifications because not only do they affect gene activity in normal cell function, epigenetic markers accumulate with time, contribute to aging, and can affect of the health of future generations as we can pass them on to our children.
[...]
In the new paper, [the researchers] show that by using this technique, they were able to block PRC2 and selectively turn on four different genes. They were also able to show they could transdifferentiate induced pluripotent stem cells to placental progenitor cells by simply turning on two genes. Finally, the researchers were able to show how the technique can be used to find the location of specific PRC2-controlled regulatory regions from where individual genes are activated. The location of many of these are unknown. In this case, they identified a promoter region -- called a TATA box -- for a gene called TBX18. Although current thinking is that these promotor regions are close to the gene, within in 30 DNA base pairs, they found for this gene the promoter region was more than 500 base pairs away.

Low-tech approach can quintuple yield and slash need for soil pesticide. An anonymous reader shares a report: Potato cyst nematodes are a clever pest. These microscopic worms wriggle through the soil, homing in the roots of young potato plants and cutting harvests by up to 70%. They are challenging to get rid of, too: The eggs are protected inside the mother's body, which toughens after death into a cyst that can survive in the soil for years. Now, researchers have shown a simple pouch made of paper created from banana tree fibers disrupts the hatching of cyst nematodes and prevents them from finding the potato roots. The new technique has boosted yields fivefold in trials with small-scale farmers in Kenya, where the pest has recently invaded, and could dramatically reduce the need for pesticides. The strategy may benefit other crops as well.

"It's an important piece of work," says Graham Thiele, a research director at the International Potato Center who was not involved with the study. But, "There's still quite a lot of work to take it from a nice finding to a real-life solution for farmers in East Africa," he cautions. Soil nematodes are a problem for many kinds of crops. For potatoes, the golden cyst nematode (Globodera rostochiensis) is a worldwide threat. Plants with infected, damaged roots have yellowish, wilting leaves. Their potatoes are smaller and often covered with lesions, so they can't be sold. In temperate countries, worms can be controlled by alternating potatoes with other crops, spraying the soil with pesticides, and planting varieties bred to resist infection. These approaches aren't yet feasible in many developing countries, in part because pesticides are expensive and resistant varieties of potatoes aren't available for tropical climates. In addition, small-scale farmers, who can make decent money selling potatoes, are often reluctant to rotate their planting with less valuable crops.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NewAtlas: A new kind of milk will soon hit US shelves but it isn't some plant-based product designed to resemble dairy milk. Instead it is made from whey proteins produced by microflora engineered to spit out exactly the same proteins found in milk from a cow. The unique cow-free milk is the first product from Betterland foods, a new company looking to create novel and sustainable food products. Betterland is working on the cow-free milk with Perfect Day, a company formed in 2014 by two vegans looking to find a way to produce tastier animal-free dairy products.

Perfect Day's big innovation was identifying whey protein as the key element in dairy products that could only be produced by an animal. Every other element could be found elsewhere. So Perfect Day scientists engineered a type of fungus to produce cow whey proteins through a process called precision fermentation. Creating a cow-free whey protein is only the first step in the journey to getting novel animal-free dairy products to supermarket shelves. A series of ice creams using the whey proteins were the first products using Perfect Day's proteins to reach commercial shelves, but according to Ryan Pandya, co-founder of Perfect Day, a cow-free dairy milk was always the main goal. "The two new products are a whole milk and an extra creamy milk," adds the report. "The milk contains eight grams of protein and has 67 percent less sugar than conventional cow milk. It is also lactose and cholesterol free."

While the cow-free milk "will likely still trigger allergic responses" for individuals allergic to dairy, the company argues this new type of milk may be vegan friendly because their whey protein technically isn't an animal product.

Thelasko shares a report from CNET: NASA's Curiosity rover snapped a gorgeous, delicate formation on Mars that looks like it could be a branching piece of ocean coral. It's not coral, but it's worth contemplating how we see familiar Earth objects in random shapes on Mars. The miniscule Martian sculpture invites poetic comparisons. It resembles a water droplet captured at the moment of explosion against a surface, or the tendrils of an anemone in a tide pool.

The image comes from Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (Mahli) instrument, which NASA describes as "the rover's version of the magnifying hand lens that geologists usually carry with them into the field." So the formation in the image is quite small. Abigail Fraeman, a deputy project scientist for Curiosity, tweeted a helpful visual guide that compares the object with a US penny to give an approximate sense of the scale. Fraeman writes that the image "shows teeny, tiny delicate structures that formed by mineral precipitating from water."

British science is facing the threat of a highly damaging brain drain that could see scores of top young researchers leaving the UK. In addition, the futures of several major British-led international projects are also now in jeopardy following a delay in funding by the European Union. From a report: Senior scientists say the UK's scientific standing is at serious risk while others have warned that major programmes -- including medical projects aimed at tackling global scourges such as malaria -- face cancellation. "There is a real prospect that bright young scientists will decide it will be best for their careers if they leave the UK," said Martin Smith, head of policy at the Wellcome Trust. "At the same time, if research partnerships involving the UK break down, Britain will no longer be seen as a reliable scientific partner. UK science will suffer."

On Thursday the head of Russia's space agency "warned that new sanctions imposed on his country could have dire consequences for the International Space Station program," reports Space.com (in an article shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm): "Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS?" read one of the tweets from Roscosmos Director-General Dimitry Rogozin, which was translated by Rob Mitchell for Ars Technica senior space editor Eric Berger, who shared Mitchell's translation on Twitter. Russia and the United States are the major partners in the ISS program, which also includes Canada, Japan and multiple European nations...

NASA, however, told Space.com later Thursday that civil cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in space will continue, particularly with regard to the ISS.

But Rogozin struck a much different tone, suggesting that the new sanctions could potentially result in the ISS crashing to Earth in an uncontrolled fashion. (The Russian segment of the ISS is responsible for guidance, navigation and control for the entire complex, according to the European Space Agency. And Russian Progress cargo craft provide periodic orbit-raising boosts for the ISS, to ensure that it doesn't sink too low into Earth's atmosphere....) Rogozin also stressed that the ISS would deorbit naturally without periodic reboosts courtesy of Progress freighters....

Just days ago, however, a Cygnus spacecraft built by aerospace company Northrop Grumman arrived at the ISS with a mandate to perform the program's first operational reboost, which may eventually transfer this capability to U.S. vehicles as well.
Business Insider reports that Thursday's tweets from the head of Russia's space agency also included a dire hypothetical. "If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe?"

On Saturday Elon Musk "responded by posting the logo of his company, SpaceX." Musk appeared to confirm that SpaceX would get involved, should the ISS fall out of orbit. A Twitter user asked if that's what the tech mogul really meant, to which Musk simply replied: "Yes."

NASA, meanwhile, said it "continues working with Roscosmos and our other international partners in Canada, Europe, and Japan to maintain safe and continuous ISS operations," in a statement to Euronews.

Harvard's School of Public Health has an announcement...

"Multiple sclerosis (MS), a progressive disease that affects 2.8 million people worldwide and for which there is no definitive cure, is likely caused by infection with the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), according to a study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers."

Epstein-Barr virus has already been linked to some forms of cancer. But now, as the New York Times put it, "New research proves a virus — one that almost all of us have — 'causes' multiple sclerosis." (More than 90% of adults have the Epstein-Barr virus, and "The very ubiquity of Epstein-Barr has made it especially difficult to isolate as a causal factor...") Researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and elsewhere, however, devised a novel way to carry out that study, and they published their findings in January in Science. U.S. military recruits, a group of more than 10 million people, are screened for H.I.V. when their service starts and biennially thereafter. Their blood serum samples are then archived in the Department of Defense Serum Repository and can be retested for other pathogens. Between 1993 and 2013, the researchers identified cases of M.S. among active-duty U.S. military personnel. Then they tested their first serum sample; their last sample before M.S. onset; and one in between. They found that of 801 soldiers with M.S., 800 were positive for Epstein-Barr....

"In practical terms, if you're not infected with E.B.V., your risk of M.S. is virtually zero," says Alberto Ascherio, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard and a senior author of the Science study. "After infection, your risk jumps by over 30-fold." The odds of that increase having occurred by chance are less than one in a million....

That was the strongest evidence yet that Epstein-Barr initiates M.S., but it didn't explain why. Just over a week after the Science paper came out, though, Robinson and colleagues published their own paper in Nature that demonstrated how the virus triggers the disease in some people. Epstein-Barr produces proteins that mimic a protein in the myelin sheath, they found; when the immune system makes antibodies to attack the virus, they also attack the myelin — "the insulation around your neurons," as Robinson puts it. "Like electrical wires, if the insulation gets stripped off, it short-âcircuits," he says. "That's what results in M.S."

This protein mix-up, though, can only explain about a quarter of M.S. cases. And while the Science paper concludes that Epstein-Barr is the "leading cause" of M.S., Cohen says he wants to be careful with the word "cause." He thinks the study proves that the virus is a necessary precondition for M.S., but the fact that so many people have Epstein-Barr and so few of them get M.S. demonstrates that other factors, very likely including genetic susceptibility, must play a significant role in the development of the disease....

What is exciting about the discovery that Epstein-Barr is necessary for M.S. is that it raises the prospect that a vaccine could prevent that disease — as well as other serious conditions — even if we never understand precisely why the virus behaves as it does in a given individual.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Thelasko for sharing the news!

Long-time Slashdot reader IHTFISP brings this report from SciTechDaily: Researchers from the University of Turku, Finland, found that the axis of rotation of a black hole in a binary system is tilted more than 40 degrees relative to the axis of stellar orbit. The finding challenges current theoretical models of black hole formation. The observation by the researchers from Tuorla Observatory in Finland is the first reliable measurement that shows a large difference between the axis of rotation of a black hole and the axis of a binary system orbit. The difference between the axes measured by the researchers in a binary star system called MAXI J1820+070 was more than 40 degrees....

[T]he researchers were able to determine the direction of the axis of rotation of the black hole very accurately. As the amount of gas falling from the companion star to the black hole later began to decrease, the system dimmed, and much of the light in the system came from the companion star. In this way, the researchers were able to measure the orbit inclination using spectroscopic techniques, and it happened to nearly coincide with the inclination of the ejections....

The results published in Science magazine open interesting prospects towards studies of black hole formation and evolution of such systems, as such extreme misalignment is hard to get in many black hole formation and binary evolution scenarios. "The difference of more than 40 degrees between the orbital axis and the black hole spin was completely unexpected. Scientists have often assumed this difference to be very small when they have modeled the behavior of matter in a curved time space around a black hole. The current models are already really complex, and now the new findings force us to add a new dimension to them," Poutanen states.

"Elon Musk says SpaceX's Starlink satellites are now active over Ukraine after a request from the embattled country's leadership to replace internet services destroyed by the Russian attack," reports the Independent, in a story shared by Slashdot readers schwit1 and SubMitt: Vladimir Putin's unprovoked invasion has left parts of the country without internet, while SpaceX has launched thousands of communications satellites to bring broadband to hard to reach areas of the world.

"Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route," the entrepreneur tweeted on Saturday.

The move came after Ukraine's vice prime minister urged Mr Musk to help them out, as the SpaceX system does not require any fiber-optic cables.
Newsweek reports that on Friday Ukraine's Vice Prime Minister also asked Apple's Tim Cook to stop providing products and services to Russians — including the Apple Store.

Slashdot reader Tangential shares what he describes as "an interesting article on Gizmodo discussing how we could easily contaminate other planets/moons as we explore them."

"Based on our recently demonstrated vulnerability to locally evolved bacteria and viruses, what will other worlds's pathogens do to us (and what will ours do to them?) What I also find interesting is what a small percentage of SciFi actually addresses this."

From Gizmodo's article: The year is 2034. Humans have sent a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa to drill through the icy surface and photograph the ocean beneath. In the few hours before it stops functioning, the probe returns images of shapes that could be some form of life. Scientists quickly organize a followup mission that will collect samples of that spot and bring them back to Earth. But, unknown to anyone, the first probe wasn't sterile — it carried a hardy bacteria that had survived even the mission's clean rooms. By the time the samples finally reach Earth years later, they're dominated by this bacteria, which has happily set up shop in Europa's dark, salty waters. Just like that, our first opportunity to study a truly alien ecosystem has been destroyed.

This is a nightmare scenario for NASA and other space agencies, and it's one they've worked intensely to avoid with every mission to another orb. But some researchers from a lesser-known branch of ecology argue that even the current strict standards aren't rigorous enough, and as more ambitious missions to other planets and moons get ready to launch, the risk of interplanetary contamination becomes more dire. They say we need to better plan for "forward contamination," in which our technology disseminates Earth microbes, as well as "back contamination," in which life from elsewhere hitches a ride to Earth.

In fact, we already have a playbook to lean on: the discipline of invasion science, the study of how species on our planet invade each other's ecosystems. "What I would say is that, given that there are now concrete plans in place to explore new areas that could have extant life — these pose a new set of risks that were not in play before," Anthony Ricciardi, a professor of invasion ecology and aquatic ecosystems at McGill University, told Gizmodo. "Invasion science has been applied to biosecurity at national and international levels. My colleagues and I believe that it could similarly guide biosecurity at the planetary or interplanetary scales."

Because of the groundbreaking technological advances of recent years, our ability to explore other worlds — from asteroids to planets to ocean moons — is expanding, and so are the risks that come with that. NASA plans to bring bits of Mars to Earth in the early 2030s, and missions to Titan and Europa, which could very well host life, are set to launch this decade.... Although the 2034 Europa tale is invented, there's plenty of precedent for it. We've likely accidentally brought drug-resistant bacteria into the Antarctic ecosystem already, infecting seabirds and seals.

Our lack of foresight and carelessness is driving mass extinctions on Earth — are we willing to do the same thing to the next inhabited world we touch?

The New York times reports that two extensive new studies released today "point to a market in Wuhan, China as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic." The researchers analyzed data from a range of sources to look for clues to how the pandemic arose. They concluded that the coronavirus was present in live mammals sold in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late 2019. The research suggests that the virus very likely twice spilled over into people working or shopping at the market.

The researchers said they found no support for an alternate hypothesis that the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

"When you look at all of the evidence together, it's an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market," said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of both studies....

Many of the first cases of Covid-19 clustered around the Huanan market.
Worobey posted an animated GIF on Twitter summarizing what he sees as some of the most compelling evidence that the virus originated from the market.

it includes the fact that "the vast majority" of cases at the market came specifically from where wildlife was being sold — and that an animal cage and a freezer at the market even tested positive for the presence of Covid-19.

According to CNN the lead researcher "called the findings 'game, set and match' for the theory that the pandemic originated in a lab. 'It's no longer something that makes sense to imagine that this started any other way.'"