A team of astronomers has used archival images from a survey telescope to look for Starlink tracks over the past two years. Over that time, the number of images affected rose by a factor of 35, and the researchers estimate that by the time the planned Starlink constellation is complete, pretty much every image from their hardware will have at least one track in it. Ars Technica reports: SpaceX's Starlink Internet service will require a dense constellation of satellites to provide consistent, low-latency connectivity. The system already has over 1,500 satellites in orbit and has received approval to operate 12,000 of them. And that has astronomers worried. Although SpaceX has taken steps to reduce the impact of its hardware, there's no way to completely eliminate the tracks the satellites leave across ground-based observations. [...] In response to complaints from the astronomy community, SpaceX put visors on later generations of Starlink satellites. The research team was able to compare the visibility of these different generations and found that the visors worked -- satellites with visors dropped in brightness by a factor of roughly 4.6 (the precise number depended upon the wavelength). The visibility, however, was still higher than the target set at a workshop that was meant to address this issue.

Because these tracks are small and software already identifies and handles them, they don't have much of an effect on observations. The researchers estimate that, at present, there's only a 0.04 percent chance that a rare event will be missed because it coincides with a track. But because the problem is most acute in twilight observations, it's more likely to impact searches for objects within the Solar System. This would include comets and asteroids -- including asteroids that originated around other stars. But again, the problem is likely to get worse. SpaceX already has approval to increase the number of Starlink satellites to well over 10,000; the authors estimate that at 10,000, every image at twilight will likely contain a Starlink track. SpaceX has indicated it would eventually like to boost the numbers to over 40,000 satellites, at which point all twilight images are likely to have four tracks.

And SpaceX isn't the only company planning on this sort of satellite service. If all the companies involved follow through on their plans, low Earth orbit could see as many as 100,000 of these satellites. Overall, the picture is mixed. The ZTF's main mission -- to pick out rare events caused by distant, energetic phenomena -- is largely unaffected by the growing number of satellite tracks. And because the percentage of events is currently small, tripling the number of satellites won't have a dramatic impact on observations. But a secondary science mission is already seeing a lot of light contamination, and matters are only going to get worse. The findings have been published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

After analyzing powdered rock samples collected from the surface of Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover, scientists today announced that several of the samples are rich in a type of carbon that on Earth is associated with biological processes. From a report: While the finding is intriguing, it doesn't necessarily point to ancient life on Mars, as scientists have not yet found conclusive supporting evidence of ancient or current biology there, such as sedimentary rock formations produced by ancient bacteria, or a diversity of complex organic molecules formed by life. In a report of their findings to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on January 18, Curiosity scientists offer several explanations for the unusual carbon signals they detected. Their hypotheses are drawn partly from carbon signatures on Earth, but scientists warn the two planets are so different they can't make definitive conclusions based on Earth examples.

The biological explanation Curiosity scientists present in their paper is inspired by Earth life. It involves ancient bacteria in the surface that would have produced a unique carbon signature as they released methane into the atmosphere where ultraviolet light would have converted that gas into larger, more complex molecules. These new molecules would have rained down to the surface and now could be preserved with their distinct carbon signature in Martian rocks.

Two other hypotheses offer nonbiological explanations. One suggests the carbon signature could have resulted from the interaction of ultraviolet light with carbon dioxide gas in the Martian atmosphere, producing new carbon-containing molecules that would have settled to the surface. And the other speculates that the carbon could have been left behind from a rare event hundreds of millions of years ago when the solar system passed through a giant molecular cloud rich in the type of carbon detected.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: For the first time, a team of scientists has now demonstrated the quantum mechanical principle of superabsorption that underpins quantum batteries in a proof-of-concept device. "Superabsorption is a quantum collective effect where transitions between the states of the molecules interfere constructively," James Quach, corresponding author of the study, told New Atlas. "Constructive interference occurs in all kinds of waves (light, sound, waves on water), and occurs when different waves add up to give a larger effect than either wave on its own. Crucially this allows the combined molecules to absorb light more efficiently than if each molecule were acting individually." In a quantum battery, this phenomenon would have a very clear benefit. The more energy-storing molecules you have, the more efficiently they'll be able to absorb that energy -- in other words, the bigger you make the battery, the faster it will charge. At least, that's how it should work in theory. Superabsorption had yet to be demonstrated on a scale large enough to build quantum batteries, but the new study has now managed just that.

To build their test device, the researchers placed an active layer of light-absorbing molecules -- a dye known as Lumogen-F Orange -- in a microcavity between two mirrors. "The mirrors in this microcavity were made using a standard method to make high quality mirrors," explained Quach. "This is to use alternating layers of dielectric materials -- silicon dioxide and niobium pentoxide -- to create what is known as a 'distributed Bragg reflector.' This produces mirrors which reflect much more of the light than a typical metal/glass mirror. This is important as we want light to stay inside the cavity as long as possible." The team then used ultrafast transient-absorption spectroscopy to measure how the dye molecules were storing the energy and how fast the whole device was charging. And sure enough, as the size of the microcavity and the number of molecules increased, the charging time decreased, demonstrating superabsorption at work. "The idea here is a proof-of-principle that enhanced absorption of light is possible in such a device," Quach told New Atlas. "The key challenge though is to bridge the gap between the proof-of-principle here for a small device, and exploiting the same ideas in larger usable devices. The next steps are to explore how this can be combined with other ways of storing and transferring energy, to provide a device that could be practically useful."

The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: Officials in Beijing are telling people to avoid international mail and to open their packages outdoors and with gloves, saying cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant could have spread through foreign mail. Experts have repeatedly said that there is little risk of getting the coronavirus from mail. There is no indication that this has changed with the Omicron variant, though it is more infectious. But Robin Brant, the BBC's China correspondent, tweeted on Monday that Beijing was telling residents not to order goods from abroad, and to open packages outside with gloves and a mask on. The South China Morning Post also reported on Monday that Beijing's center for disease control and prevention said that people should order as little as possible from abroad, and that people should wear gloves and masks when opening any mail from high-risk countries. It comes as the center said the first recorded case of the Omicron variant in Beijing could have entered via mail. Officials in Beijing say the man who was infected was sent mail from Canada on January 7. They claim to have detected the Omicron variant on the letter.

Canada's post office notes that the risk of the coronavirus spreading via mail is low as it doesn't live long on surfaces.

A fourth dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was insufficient to prevent infection with the omicron variant of Covid-19, according to preliminary data from a trial in Israel released Monday. Bloomberg reports: Two weeks after the start of the trial of 154 medical personnel at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, researchers found the vaccine successfully raised antibody levels. But that only offered a partial defense against omicron, according to Gili Regev-Yochay, the trial's lead researcher. Vaccines which were more effective against previous variants offer less protection with omicron, she said. Still, those infected in the trial had only slight symptoms or none at all.

Israel started rolling out the fourth dose of the vaccine to the over-60s and immunocompromised in late December amid a surge in cases. Since then, more than half a million Israelis have received the extra dose, according to the Health Ministry. The decision to give the fourth vaccine to the most vulnerable was the correct one, Regev-Yochay said at a virtual press conference, since it may have given additional benefit against omicron. But she added the results didn't support a wider rollout to the whole population.

Following weeks of soaring infections, the latest Covid surge is showing signs of slowing in a handful of areas hit earliest by the omicron variant -- offering a glimmer of hope that this wave is starting to ease. From a report: The U.S. has reported an average of nearly 800,000 cases per day over the past week, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, more than three times the level seen during last winter's previous record. But in a handful of states and cities, particularly on the East Coast, cases appear to have plateaued or fallen in recent days. In New York, the seven-day average of daily new cases has been declining since hitting a record high of 85,000 per day on Jan. 9, according to Hopkins data. Cases there doubled during a number of seven-day periods in late December and early January, but are down sharply from last week to an average of 51,500. In New York City, average daily cases have fallen by 31% over the past week, state health department data shows. "There will come a time when we can say it's all over," Gov. Kathy Hochul said at a press conference Friday. "We're not there yet, but boy, it's on the horizon and we've waited a long time for that." New York is still reporting a high level of daily infections, ranking 15th out of all states, according to a CNBC analysis of population-adjusted case counts, down from the second-most just a few days ago. New Jersey also recently fell out of the top five, now ranking 20th, as the state has seen a 32% drop in average daily cases over the past week.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot wanted to share this New York Times article which makes the point that "The stunning Covid vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew upon long-buried discoveries made in the hopes of ending past epidemics..." They remain a marvel: Even as the Omicron variant fuels a new wave of the pandemic, the vaccines have proved remarkably resilient at defending against severe illness and death. And the manufacturers, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, say that mRNA technology will allow them to adapt the vaccines quickly, to fend off whatever dangerous new version of the virus that evolution brings next.

Skeptics have seized on the rapid development of the vaccines — among the most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era — to undermine the public's trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the vaccines unfolded over decades, little by little, as scientists across the world pursued research in disparate areas, never imagining their work would one day come together to tame the pandemic of the century. The pharmaceutical companies harnessed these findings and engineered a consistent product that could be made at scale, partly with the help of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's multibillion-dollar program to hasten the development and manufacture of vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests to fight the new virus.

For years, though, the scientists who made the vaccines possible scrounged for money and battled public indifference. Their experiments often failed. When the work got too crushing, some of them left it behind. And yet on this unpredictable, zigzagging path, the science slowly built upon itself, squeezing knowledge from failure.

The vaccines were possible only because of efforts in three areas. The first began more than 60 years ago with the discovery of mRNA, the genetic molecule that helps cells make proteins. A few decades later, two scientists in Pennsylvania decided to pursue what seemed like a pipe dream: using the molecule to command cells to make tiny pieces of viruses that would strengthen the immune system. The second effort took place in the private sector, as biotechnology companies in Canada in the budding field of gene therapy — the modification or repair of genes to treat diseases — searched for a way to protect fragile genetic molecules so they could be safely delivered to human cells. The third crucial line of inquiry began in the 1990s, when the U.S. government embarked on a multibillion-dollar quest to find a vaccine to prevent AIDS. That effort funded a group of scientists who tried to target the all-important "spikes" on H.I.V. viruses that allow them to invade cells. The work has not resulted in a successful H.I.V. vaccine. But some of these researchers, including Dr. Graham, veered from the mission and eventually unlocked secrets that allowed the spikes on coronaviruses to be mapped instead.

In early 2020, these different strands of research came together. The spike of the Covid virus was encoded in mRNA molecules. Those molecules were wrapped in a protective layer of fat and poured into small glass vials. When the shots went in arms less than a year later, recipients' cells responded by producing proteins that resembled the spikes — and that trained the body to attack the coronavirus.

The extraordinary tale proved the promise of basic scientific research: that once in a great while, old discoveries can be plucked from obscurity to make history.

An anonymous reader shared this report on "Super-Recognizers" from a series of articles in the Guardian called "Meet the Superhumans." As a child, Yenny Seo often surprised her mother by pointing out a stranger in the grocery store, remarking it was the same person they passed on the street a few weeks earlier. Likewise, when they watched a movie together, Seo would often recognise "extras" who'd appeared fleetingly in other films... A cohort of just 1-2% of the population are "super-recognisers" — people who can memorise and recall unfamiliar faces, even after the briefest glimpse.

The underlying cause is still not entirely clear — it's a new field, with only around 20 scientific papers studying super-recognisers. However, it is suspected genetics plays a role because identical twins show similar performance, and it has been shown that cortical thickness — the amount of neurons — in the part of the brain that supports face recognition is a predictor of superior ability. Because it's such a rare phenomenon, in 2017 Dr. David White, now a lead investigator at the Face Research Lab at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and his colleagues designed a publicly available online screening tool to try to unearth the world's best super-recognisers. Seo, then in her mid-twenties, gave it a go — and her score was so high, White invited her to come to Sydney for more testing.

With more than 100,000 people now tested, Seo still ranks in the top 50....

Over the past decade, security and law enforcement agencies around the world have started recruiting people with superior facial recognition capabilities. London's metropolitan police has a special team who examine CCTV footage from crime scenes — they were used in the investigation into the poisoning of a former Russian spy with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury — and several years ago Queensland police started identifying super-recognisers in its ranks. A proliferation of private agencies has also sprung up, offering the services of super-recognisers.

Seo has no interest....

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco shares a fish story from the Guardian.

Apparently Israeli researchers created a robotic car and taught six fish to navigate it on land... First, the team, led by Prof Ronen Segev, created a watery tank on wheels that moved in response to the movements and orientation of the fish. Then they set about teaching the goldfish (Carassius auratus) how to drive it — much like humans learn to ride a bike or drive a car.

The fish first had to connect their own swimming movements to the movements of the vehicle so they could navigate it. Then they were given a destination: a pink target board in a foreign room that elicited a food reward when the vehicle touched it. A computerised camera system attached to this "fish operated vehicle" recorded and translated the fish's swimming directions.

After several days of training, the fish successfully navigated the vehicle to the target from different starting positions in the room — even if they faced obstacles like false targets or hitting a wall.

Slashdot reader vikingo9 writes, "By smashing a piece of iron to insanely high pressures, using a laser the size of a football stadium, a team of scientists led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered that exoplanets 4-6 times larger than Earth have an increase chance of harboring biological life."

The thinking goes that a molten core "is probably required for life to develop on a planet," Popular Science points out — and this experiment suggests that molten cores of larger rocky exoplanets "should stay hot longer than those within small worlds." "We're finding so many planets, and [one of] the big questions people have are: are these planets potentially habitable?" says Rick Kraus, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the study... Kraus and his team wanted to find other ways to discern whether a planet is habitable. They explored a planet's ability to form a magnetosphere — a magnetic field that protects it from solar radiation, like the one around Earth does for us — as a window into habitability, Kraus says. Life as we know it wouldn't be possible without the Earth's magnetic field.

Magnetic fields are a result of molten planetary cores. Earth has a core composed mostly of iron, split into a solid inner core and a liquid outer core. Earth's magnetic field is caused by the convection of the liquid iron, meaning how it swirls: The cooler, denser liquid areas sink to the bottom, while the hotter ones rise like wax in a lava lamp. Studying an exoplanet's core in a laboratory is difficult because there are few ways to recreate such intense pressures and temperatures.

This is the first experiment to use iron under pressures that exceed those in Earth's core, Kraus says...

The team estimates that it will take a total of 6 billion years for Earth's core to solidify, whereas cores in large exoplanets of similar composition to Earth should take up to 30 percent longer.
Of course, the article ends with a few caveats: One issue with extrapolating these results to exoplanets is that those super-Earths can contain elements other than iron in their core, which would change their melting temperature by an unknown amount, Driscoll says. It will also be hard to predict how exoplanets cool because the mantle, the layer of hot rock surrounding the core, plays a huge role in how quickly the core can cool. And those exoplanet mantles could be made of "pretty much anything," he says.

While a recent study found that cannabinoids protected cells in a petri dish from SARS-CoV-2 infection, "working in a petri dish is a relatively low bar for a drug to clear," Slate points out.

"The conventional wisdom in pharmaceutical sciences holds that, of every 10,000 drugs that shows potential effectiveness, only one will make it to market." Dish experiments need to be followed up with animal studies, and then comes the rigorous gauntlet of human trials. And between cells and humans, there's a lot that can go wrong. In a dish, scientists can deliver a drug precisely to where it is needed, but it's difficult to know ahead of time how drugs will move through a body and whether they will reach their intended targets, such as the lungs and the upper respiratory tract. At this stage, it's impossible to know how CBDA and CBGA will fare, but the odds aren't fantastic.

Other drugs that showed similar early promise for treating COVID have since failed spectacularly, harming users and sowing political discord in the process. Ivermectin, azithromycin, and hydroxychloroquine all fought coronavirus infection in cells, but we now know that they do nothing to prevent or treat COVID in humans.

But at least cannabinoids are largely safe; humans have been guinea pigs in their Phase 1 trial for millennia.
Another important caveat: even the researcher's study was only proposing cannabinoids "as a complement to vaccines."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A four billion-year-old meteorite from Mars that caused a splash here on Earth decades ago contains no evidence of ancient, primitive Martian life after all, scientists have said. In 1996, a NASA-led team announced that organic compounds in the rock appeared to have been left by living creatures. Other scientists were skeptical and researchers chipped away at that premise over the decades, most recently by a team led by the Carnegie Institution for Science's Andrew Steele. Tiny samples from the meteorite show the carbon-rich compounds are actually the result of water -- most likely salty or briny water -- flowing over the rock for a prolonged period, Steele said. The findings appear in the Science journal.

During Mars' wet and early past, at least two impacts occurred near the rock, heating the planet's surrounding surface, before a third impact bounced it off the red planet and into space millions of years ago. The 4lb (2kg) rock was found in Antarctica in 1984. Groundwater moving through the cracks in the rock, while it was still on Mars, formed the tiny globs of carbon that are present, according to the researchers. The same thing can happen on Earth and could help explain the presence of methane in Mars' atmosphere, they said. But two scientists who took part in the original study took issue with these latest findings, calling them "disappointing." In a shared email, they said they stand by their 1996 observations. "While the data presented incrementally adds to our knowledge of (the meteorite), the interpretation is hardly novel, nor is it supported by the research," wrote Kathie Thomas-Keprta and Simon Clemett, astromaterial researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "Unsupported speculation does nothing to resolve the conundrum surrounding the origin of organic matter" in the meteorite, they added.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Ars Technica: Space isn't easy on humans. Some aspects are avoidable -- the vacuum, of course, and the cold, as well as some of the radiation. Astronauts can also lose bone density, thanks to a lack of gravity. NASA has even created a fun acronym for the issues: RIDGE, which stands for space radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, gravity fields, and hostile and closed environments. New research adds to the worries by describing how being in space destroys your blood. Or rather, something about space -- and we don't know what just yet -- causes the human body to perform hemolysis at a higher rate than back on Earth.

This phenomenon, called space anemia, has been well-studied. It's part of a suite of problems that astronauts face when they come back to terra firma, which is how Guy Trudel -- one of the paper's authors and a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation at The Ottawa Hospital -- got involved. "[W]hen the astronauts return from space, they are very much like the patients we admit in rehab," he told Ars. Space anemia had been viewed as an adaptation to shifting fluids in the astronauts' upper bodies when they first arrive in space. They rapidly lose 10 percent of the liquid in their blood vessels, and it was expected that their bodies destroyed a matching 10 percent of red blood cells to get things back into balance. People also suspected that things went back to normal after 10 days. Trudel and his team found, however, that the hemolysis was a primary response to being in space. "Our results were a bit of a surprise," he said. [...]

Trudel's team isn't sure exactly why being in space would cause the human body to destroy blood cells at this faster rate. There are some potential culprits, however. Hemolysis can happen in four different parts of the body: the bone marrow (where red blood cells are made), the blood vessels, the liver, or the spleen. From this list, Trudel suspects that the bone marrow or the spleen are the most likely problem areas, and his team has plans to investigate the issue further in the future. "What causes the anemia is the hemolysis, but what causes the hemolysis is the next step," he said. It's also uncertain how long a person in space can continue to destroy 54 percent more red blood cells than their Earth-bound kin. "We don't have data beyond six months. There's a knowledge gap for longer missions, for one-year missions, or missions to the Moon or Mars or other bodies," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceNews: Meet the kunga, the earliest known hybrid animal bred by people. The ancient equine from Syro-Mesopotamia existed around 4,500 years ago and was a cross between a donkey and a hemippe, a type of Asiatic wild ass, researchers report January 14 in Science Advances. Horses didn't appear in this region of Asia until 4,000 years ago, centuries after their domestication in Russia. But dozens of equine skeletons were excavated in the early 2000s from a royal burial complex dating back to 2600 B.C. at Umm el-Marra in northern Syria. The animals, whose physical features didn't match any known equine species, appear to be "kungas" -- horselike animals seen in artwork and referenced in clay tablets predating horses by centuries.

"They were highly valued, very expensive," says paleogeneticist Eva-Maria Geigl of Institut Jacques Monod in Paris. Geigl and her colleagues analyzed a kunga's genome, or genetic instruction book, and compared it with those of horses, donkeys and Asiatic wild asses, including the hemippe (Equus hemionus hemippus), which has been extinct since 1929. The kunga's mother was a donkey and its father a hemippe, making it the oldest evidence of humans creating hybrid animals. A mule from 1000 B.C. in Anatolia reported by the same research group in 2020 is the next oldest hybrid. Geigl thinks kungas were created for warfare, as they could pull wagons. Coaxing donkeys into dangerous situations is hard, she says, and no Asiatic wild ass can be tamed. But a hybrid might have had the characteristics people sought.

fahrbot-bot writes: A federal judge on Friday ordered notorious "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli banned for life from the pharmaceutical industry and also ordered him to pay $64.6 million in profits he earned from hiking the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim by more than 5,000% overnight. The ruling in U.S. District Court in Manhattan came in response to a lawsuit alleging illegal and monopolistic behavior connected with Daraprim by the incarcerated securities fraudster Shkreli.

The plaintiffs in the case were the Federal Trade Commission, and seven states, including New York and California. Those same plaintiffs last month obtained a $40 million settlement for the same claims from Vyera Pharmaceuticals, the company that Shkreli had founded. "Americans can rest easy because Martin Shkreli is a pharma bro no more," said New York Attorney General Letitia James. Shkreli is serving a seven-year federal prison term for financial crimes unrelated to his controversial price increase of Daraprim, a drug used to treat parasitic infections in pregnant women, babies, HIV patients, and others. Shkreli controversially raised the drug's price from $13.50 per pill to a whopping $750 per pill in 2015.

Astronomers say they have found a second plausible candidate for a moon beyond our solar system, an exomoon, orbiting a world nearly 6,000 light-years from Earth. Scientific American reports: Called Kepler-1708 b-i, the moon appears to be a gas-dominated object, slightly smaller than Neptune, orbiting a Jupiter-sized planet around a sunlike star -- an unusual but not wholly unprecedented planet-moon configuration. The findings appear in Nature Astronomy. Confirming or refuting the result may not be immediately possible, but given the expected abundance of moons in our galaxy and beyond, it could further herald the tentative beginnings of an exciting new era of extrasolar astronomy -- one focused not on alien planets but on the natural satellites that orbit them and the possibilities of life therein.

Kepler-1708 b-i's existence was first hinted at in 2018, during an examination of archival data by David Kipping of Columbia University, one of the discoverers of Kepler-1625 b-i, and his colleagues. The team analyzed transit data from NASA's Kepler space telescope of 70 so-called cool giants -- gas giants, such as Jupiter and Saturn, that orbit relatively far from their stars, with years consisting of more than 400 Earth days. The team looked for signs of transiting exomoons orbiting these worlds, seeking additional dips in light from any shadowy lunar companions. Then the researchers spent the next few years killing their darlings, vetting one potential exomoon candidate after another and finding each better explained by other phenomena -- with a single exception: Kepler-1708 b-i. "It's a moon candidate we can't kill," Kipping says. "For four years we've tried to prove this thing was bogus. It passed every test we can imagine."

The magnitude of the relevant smaller, additional dip in light points to the existence of a moon about 2.6 times the size of Earth. The nature of the transit method means that only the radius of worlds can be directly gleaned, not their mass. But this one's size suggests a gas giant of some sort. "It's probably in the 'mini Neptune' category," Kipping says, referring to a type of world that, despite not existing in our solar system, is present in abundance around other stars. The planet this putative mini Neptune moon orbits, the Jupiter-sized Kepler-1708 b, completes an orbit of its star every 737 days at a distance 1.6 times that between Earth and the sun. Presuming the candidate is genuinely a moon, it would orbit the planet once every 4.6 Earth days, at a distance of more than 740,000 kilometers -- nearly twice the distance our own moon's orbit around Earth. The fact that only this single candidate emerged from the analysis of 70 cool giants could suggest that large gaseous moons are "not super common" in the cosmos [...].

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The last eight years have been the eight hottest years on record, NASA and the National Oceanic Administration (NOAA) confirmed today. 2021 ranks as the sixth hottest year on record, the agencies said, as global average temperatures trend upward. Rankings aside, there were plenty of red flags throughout 2021 to show us how remarkable the year was for temperature extremes. "The fact is that we've now kind of moved into a new regime ... this is likely the warmest decade in many, many hundreds, maybe 1000s of years," says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "There's enough change that it's having impacts locally."

In North America, those local impacts included epically bad summer heat, even for typically cool regions. In late June and early July, the Pacific Northwestern US and Western Canada struggled with record-smashing temperatures that buckled roads and melted power cables. In the desert further south, California's Death Valley reached a blazing 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius) in July, potentially breaking the world record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on the planet -- for the second year in a row. Across the Atlantic, Europe experienced sweltering heat, too. A reading of 119.8 degrees Fahrenheit (48.8 degrees Celsius) in Sicily might have broken the European record for maximum temperature. (The World Meteorological Organization is still working to vet those records.) All told, July 2021 was the hottest month humans have ever recorded, according to NOAA.

Heat trapped in the world's oceans also reached record levels in 2021, according to research published this week. Ocean heatwaves are likely twice as common now as they were in the early 1980s, and they can be devastating for marine life and coastal communities. They kill coral, take a toll on fishing and crabbing industries, and can even make droughts worse onshore. Temperatures might have been even hotter in 2021, were it not for a La Nina event. La Nina is a recurring climate phenomenon defined by cooler-than-average waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific, which has predictable effects on weather patterns worldwide.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: The most extensive and densely populated breeding colony of fish anywhere lurks deep underneath the ice of the Weddell Sea, scientists aboard an Antarctic research cruise have discovered. The 240 square kilometers of regularly spaced icefish nests, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, has astonished marine ecologists. "We had no idea that it would be just on this scale, and I think that's the most fantastic thing," says Mark Belchier, a fish biologist with the British Antarctic Survey and the government of South Georgia & the South Sandwich Islands, who was not involved in the new work.

In February 2021, the RV Polarstern -- a large German research ship -- was breaking through sea ice in the Weddell Sea to study marine life. While towing video cameras and other instruments half a kilometer down, near the sea floor, the ship came upon thousands of 75-centimeter-wide nests, each occupied by a single adult icefish -- and up to 2100 eggs. "It was really an amazing sight," says deep-sea biologist Autun Purser of the Alfred Wegener Institute, who led the ship's underwater imaging. Sonar revealed nests extending for several hundred meters, like a World War I battlefield scarred by miniature craters. High-resolution video and cameras captured more than 12,000 adult icefish (Neopagetopsis ionah). The fish, which grow to about 60 centimeters, are adapted to life in the extreme cold. They produce antifreezelike compounds, and -- thanks to the region's oxygen-rich waters -- are among the only vertebrates to have colorless, hemoglobin-free blood.

Including three subsequent tows, the team on the RV Polarstern saw 16,160 closely packed fish nests, 76% of which were guarded by solitary males. Assuming a similar density of nests in the areas between the ship's transects, the researchers estimate that about 60 million nests cover roughly 240 square kilometers, they report today in Current Biology. Because of their sheer numbers, the icefish and their eggs are likely key players in the local ecosystem. [...] The vast colony, the researchers say, is a new reason to create a marine protected area in the Weddell Sea, an idea has been proposed five out of the past 6 years to the intergovernmental treaty organization that regulates fisheries there.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: A connection between the human herpesvirus Epstein-Barr and multiple sclerosis (MS) has long been suspected but has been difficult to prove. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is the primary cause of mononucleosis and is so common that 95 percent of adults carry it. Unlike Epstein-Barr, MS, a devastating demyelinating disease of the central nervous system, is relatively rare. It affects 2.8 million people worldwide. But people who contract infectious mononucleosis are at slightly increased risk of developing MS. In the disease, inflammation damages the myelin sheath that insulates nerve cells, ultimately disrupting signals to and from the brain and causing a variety of symptoms, from numbness and pain to paralysis. To prove that infection with Epstein-Barr causes MS, however, a research study would have to show that people would not develop the disease if they were not first infected with the virus. A randomized trial to test such a hypothesis by purposely infecting thousands of people would of course be unethical.

Instead researchers at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School turned to what they call "an experiment of nature." They used two decades of blood samples from more than 10 million young adults on active duty in the U.S. military (the samples were taken for routine HIV testing). About 5 percent of those individuals (several hundred thousand people) were negative for Epstein-Barr when they started military service, and 955 eventually developed MS. The researchers were able to compare the outcomes of those who were subsequently infected and those who were not. The results, published on September 13 in Science, show that the risk of multiple sclerosis increased 32-fold after infection with Epstein-Barr but not after infection with other viruses. "These findings cannot be explained by any known risk factor for MS and suggest EBV as the leading cause of MS," the researchers wrote. In an accompanying commentary, immunologists William H. Robinson and Lawrence Steinman, both at Stanford University, wrote, "These findings provide compelling data that implicate EBV as the trigger for the development of MS." Epidemiologist Alberto Ascherio, senior author of the new study, says, "The bottom line is almost: if you're not infected with EBV, you don't get MS. It's rare to get such black-and-white results."

MachineShedFred shares a report from Forbes: Compounds in cannabis can prevent infection from the virus that causes Covid-19 by blocking its entry into cells, according to a study published this week by researchers affiliated with Oregon State University. A report on the research, "Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants," was published online on Monday by the Journal of Natural Products. The researchers found that two cannabinoid acids commonly found in hemp varietals of cannabis, cannabigerolic acid, or CBGA, and cannabidiolic acid, also known as CBDA, can bind to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. By binding to the spike protein, the compounds can prevent the virus from entering cells and causing infection, potentially offering new avenues to prevent and treat the disease.

"Orally bioavailable and with a long history of safe human use, these cannabinoids, isolated or in hemp extracts, have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2," the researchers wrote in an abstract of the study. The study was led by Richard van Breemen, a researcher with Oregon State's Global Hemp Innovation Center in the College of Pharmacy and Linus Pauling Institute, in collaboration with scientists at the Oregon Health & Science University. Van Breeman said that the cannabinoids studied are common and readily available. "These cannabinoid acids are abundant in hemp and in many hemp extracts," van Breemen said, as quoted by local media. "They are not controlled substances like THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and have a good safety profile in humans."

Van Breemen added that CBDA and CBGA blocked the action of emerging variants of the virus that causes Covid-19, saying that "our research showed the hemp compounds were equally effective against variants of SARS-CoV-2, including variant B.1.1.7, which was first detected in the United Kingdom, and variant B.1.351, first detected in South Africa." [...] Although further research is needed, van Breemen noted that study shows the cannabinoids could be developed into drugs to prevent or treat Covid-19. CBDA and CBGA are produced by the hemp plant as precursors to CBD and CBG, which are familiar to many consumers. However, they are different from the acids and are not contained in hemp products." Van Breeman also noted that the research showed the cannabinoids were effective against new variants of the virus, which he said are "one of the primary concerns" in the pandemic for health officials and clinicians.
UPDATE (1/14): Slate points out that "working in a petri dish is a relatively low bar for a drug to clear," Slate points out.

"The conventional wisdom in pharmaceutical sciences holds that, of every 10,000 drugs that shows potential effectiveness, only one will make it to market."