"Two research groups say they've independently built quantum devices that can operate at temperatures above 1 Kelvin — 15 times hotter than rival technologies can withstand," reports IEEE Spectrum. (In an article shared by Slashdot reader Wave723.)

"The ability to work at higher temperatures is key to scaling up to the many qubits thought to be required for future commercial-grade quantum computers..." HongWen Jiang, a physicist at UCLA and a peer reviewer for both papers, described the research as "a technological breakthrough for semiconductor based quantum computing." In today's quantum computers, qubits must be kept inside large dilution refrigerators at temperatures hovering just above absolute zero. Electronics required to manipulate and read the qubits produce too much heat and so remain outside of the fridge, which adds complexity (and many wires) to the system...

"To me, these works do represent, in rapid succession, pretty big milestones in silicon spin qubits," says John Gamble, a peer reviewer for one of the papers and a senior quantum engineer at Microsoft. "It's compelling work...." Moving forward, Gamble is interested to see if the research groups can scale their approach to include more qubits. He's encouraged by their efforts so far, saying, "The fact that we're seeing these types of advances means the field is progressing really well and that people are thinking of the right problems."
Besides Microsoft, Google and IBM have also "invested heavily in superconducting qubits," the article points out. And there's also a hopeful comment from Lee Bassett, a physicist focused on quantum systems at the University of Pennsylvania. "Each time these silicon devices pass a milestone — and this is an important milestone — it's closer and closer to the inflection point.

"This infrastructure of integrated, silicon-based electronics could take over, and this technology could just explode."

This week U.S. president Donald Trump suspended America's $900 million annual contribution to the World Health Organization. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, called Trump's move a "crime against humanity...."

The Hill reports: "Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity," he added...

The American Medical Association (AMA) late Tuesday called Trump's decision a "dangerous step in the wrong direction" and urged him to reconsider. "Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data. Cutting funding to the WHO — rather than focusing on solutions — is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world," the AMA said in a statement. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, meanwhile, said Wednesday that there was "no reason justifying" Trump's move...

And Bill Gates said in a tweet that halting funding to the WHO amid a world health crisis "is as dangerous as it sounds."

"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them," the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist added. "The world needs @WHO now more than ever."
Agreeing with Bill Gates was 95-year-old former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Newsweek quotes Carter's newly-released statement calling the WHO "the only international organization capable of leading the effort to control this virus."

The head of the United Nations also called the WHO "absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19."

While criticizing the WHO, this week an article in the Atlantic called president Trump's moves "a transparent effort to distract from his administration's failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic." The Democrats speaker of the House added that Trump's decision "is dangerous, illegal and will be swiftly challenged."

But the science magazine Nature still published an editorial harshly criticizing Trump's attempt to defund the WHO. "[E]ven talk of doing so in the middle of a global health and economic crisis cannot be condemned strongly enough." They argue that withholding America's funds "will place more lives at risk and ensure that the world takes longer to emerge from this crisis... It is right that researchers, funders and governments have been protesting against Trump's decision, and they must continue to do so in the strongest terms."

And Newsweek also published the comments of the WHO's Director-General, who had this message for its critics. "[O]ur focus, my focus, is on stopping this virus and saving lives... This is a time for all of us to be united in our common struggle against a common threat, a dangerous enemy.

"When we're divided, the virus exploits the cracks between us."

Newsweek reports: There is no evidence to back claims the coronavirus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from a lab in China, scientists have told Newsweek.

Adam Lauring, an associate professor at the University of Michigan Medical School and an expert in the evolution of viruses, told Newsweek: "This claim is a conspiracy theory and it is not supported at all by the available data... The SARS-CoV-2 virus has some key differences in specific genes relative to previously identified coronaviruses — the ones a laboratory would be working with," said Lauring. "This constellation of changes makes it unlikely that it is the result of a laboratory 'escape.'"

Alexandre Hassanin, a lecturer at France's Sorbonne University National Museum of Natural History department of origins and evolution, similarly highlighted to Newsweek: "Even if it is difficult to prove that a laboratory accident did not take place, you should know that SARS-CoV-2 is not closely related to any previous viruses; it was never sequenced (even partially) in previous studies, and the COVID-19 outbreak began in November/December, as in previous SARS epidemic events (2002 and 2003)."

Hassanin said: "These two points suggest therefore that the current outbreak was not the consequence of a laboratory accident."
An anonymous reader adds: Today the Associated Press also called it "an outlier theory" being spread by president Trump and officials in his administration "without the weight of evidence."

On Twitter, Eric Hundman, an Assistant Professor at NYU Shanghai, had stern words for anyone still spreading this misinformation. "Insinuating that the virus escaped from a lab in China by saying 'well, there's no evidence that it didn't' is not only untrue, it amounts to disinformation that could further ratchet up US-China tensions and distract from more urgent priorities.

*There actually is scientific evidence against the "escaped from a lab" theory."
He then cites five different scientists who wrote in Nature magazine that "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."

In fact, "Most experts push back on the lab leak theory," CNN reported earlier this month. "I think it has no credibility," they were told by Vincent Racaniello, a microbiology professor at Columbia University who hosts a podcast called "This Week in Virology."

And they got the same response from Dr. Simon Anthony, a professor at the public health grad school of Columbia University and a key member of PREDICT. "It all feels far-fetched. Lab accidents do happen, we know that, but... there's certainly no evidence to support that theory."

That's also the opinion of America's intelligence community. Business Insider writes: The US intelligence community has also been investigating whether the virus was collected by researchers and then accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab but has found no evidence to date backing it up, according to Politico, which cited multiple sources familiar with the matter. Or, as Politico puts it: Congressional intelligence committees have been asking various agencies if hard evidence exists to support it. So far, there is none, multiple sources familiar with the matter told POLITICO.
UPDATE (4/19/20): On Sunday even Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House's Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator, acknowledged "I don't have evidence that it was a laboratory accident."

GeekWire reports: The University of Washington School of Medicine's Virology Lab is reporting encouraging results from trial runs of a new test from Abbott Laboratories that detects the antibodies created by people who have had COVID-19, whether they knew they had it or not. "This is a really fantastic test," Keith Jerome, who leads UW Medicine's virology program, told reporters today. He said UW's lab could process 4,000 samples per day starting next week, and conceivably ramp up to 14,000 samples per day within a couple of weeks.

The test will be made available through health care providers, in medical clinics or perhaps through workplaces... Epidemiologists say knowing who has had the virus will be key to tracking the true spread of COVID-19, and giving assurances to people who are returning to school and work — particularly in front-line jobs ranging from first responders and health care workers to grocery store clerks.

"It's possible this could be part of a back-to-work process," Jerome said. It's not yet clear how much immunity people develop to COVID-19 in the course of fighting off the virus, but if SARS-CoV-2 behaves like other coronaviruses, people with antibodies should have at least some protection from re-infection...

There's also a chance that being able to detect antibodies for COVID-19 will speed the development of vaccines in the months ahead.
1 million of the tests will be shipped this week in the U.S., and up to 4 million in the month of April, GeekWire reports.

And by June the company plans to be shipping 20 million tests per month.

Russian officials said they've halted manufacturing of the country's workhorse Soyuz rocket, which most recently flew on April 9 to carry three astronauts to the ISS in a launch that was essentially unaffected by the pandemic. Space.com reports: The news of the pandemic's impact on its production comes from an English-language transcript released on April 10 by Russia's government of a call held by President Vladimir Putin and a group of space center leaders. During that call, Putin cautioned against using the pandemic as a scapegoat for issues within the industry. "Clearly, the fact that we have to fight the coronavirus is forcing us to make adjustments in our country, the economy in general and Roscosmos specifically," Putin said at the end of the public portion of the call, according to the transcript. "At the same time, I would like to warn you against the temptation to blame unresolved issues and loose ends -- which are still in abundance -- on the coronavirus."

Russian space manufacturing has raised concerns since a small air leak on a Soyuz spacecraft docked to the space station in August 2018 and a failed Soyuz rocket launch in October 2018 sent two astronauts tumbling back to Earth during an emergency abort (they landed safely). Since then, all crewed launches have gone smoothly, and last week's launch relied on a different model of the Soyuz 2 rocket than the version that failed.

But for now, Soyuz 2 production is on hold, Dmitry Baranov, general director of the Progress Rocket and Space Center where the rocket is built, said during the call. Baranov said that decision was made because 52 completed Soyuz 2 rockets are on hand at the facility and at launch sites worldwide. Other aspects of rocket work are continuing as usual, including maintenance and testing of completed Soyuz 2 rockets and production of the Soyuz 5, a heavy-lift launch vehicle planned to make its first flight in late 2022, Baranov said. The facility will also consider restoring the full workforce with protective measures in place sometime after next week, he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: The tiny fossil is unassuming, as dinosaur remains go. It is not as big as an Apatosaurus femur or as impressive as a Tyrannosaurus jaw. The object is a just a scant shard of cartilage from the skull of a baby hadrosaur called Hypacrosaurus that perished more than 70 million years ago. But it may contain something never before seen from the depths of the Mesozoic era: degraded remnants of dinosaur DNA. [...] In a study published earlier this year, Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Alida Bailleul and her colleagues proposed that in that fossil, they had found not only evidence of original proteins and cartilage-creating cells but a chemical signature consistent with DNA.

Recovering genetic material of such antiquity would be a major development. Working on more recently extinct creatures -- such as mammoths and giant ground sloths -- paleontologists have been able to revise family trees, explore the interrelatedness of species and even gain some insights into biological features such as variations in coloration. DNA from nonavian dinosaurs would add a wealth of new information about the biology of the "terrible lizards." Such a find would also establish the possibility that genetic material can remain detectable not just for one million years, but for tens of millions. The fossil record would not be bones and footprints alone: it would contain scraps of the genetic record that ties together all life on Earth. Yet first, paleontologists need to confirm that these possible genetic traces are the real thing. Such potential tatters of ancient DNA are not exactly Jurassic Park -- quality. At best, their biological makers seem to be degraded remnants of genes that cannot be read -- broken-down components rather than intact parts of a sequence. Still, these potential tatters of ancient DNA would be far older (by millions of years) than the next closest trace of degraded genetic material in the fossil record. "If upheld, Bailleul and her colleagues' findings would indicate that biochemical traces of organisms can persist for tens of millions of years longer than previously thought," the report adds. "And that would mean there may be an entire world of biological information experts are only just getting to know."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Deep in the Pacific Ocean, six-foot-long Humboldt squid are known for being aggressive, cannibalistic and, according to new research, good communicators. Known as "red devils," the squid can rapidly change the color of their skin, making different patterns to communicate, something other squid species are known to do. But Humboldt squid live in almost total darkness more than 1,000 feet below the surface, so their patterns aren't very visible. Instead, according to a new study, they create backlighting for the patterns by making their bodies glow, like the screen of an e-reader.

Ben Burford, a graduate student at Stanford University, and his colleagues studied deep-water footage taken by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute's remotely operated vehicles off the California coast. They found the squid make around 30 different patterns of lines, stripes and patches. The patterns appear dark, but researchers believe they're illuminated by the squid's bioluminescent skin. Some of the patterns are only used around other squid, suggesting they're used for communication. The squid also appear to reorder the patterns, almost like words in a sentence.

In a preprint academic paper published in early April, MIT researchers describe a model that quantifies the impact of quarantine measures on the spread of COVID-19, the novel coronavirus. From a report: Unlike most of the models that have so far been proposed, this one doesn't rely on data from studies about previous outbreaks, like SARS or MERS. Instead, it taps an AI algorithm trained to capture the number of infected individuals under quarantine using the SEIR model, which groups people into classes like "susceptible," "exposed," "infected," and "recovered." This approach potentially achieves accuracy higher than or comparable to previous work, which could help to better inform governments, health systems, and nonprofits as they make treatment and policy decisions about social distancing. For instance, the model found that in places like South Korea, where there was immediate government intervention, the virus spread plateaued more quickly.

"Our model shows that quarantine restrictions are successful in getting the effective reproduction number from larger than one to smaller than one. The [model] is learning what we are calling the 'quarantine control strength function,'" said George Barbastathis, MIT professor of mechanical engineering, who developed the model over the course of several weeks with civil and environmental engineering Ph.D. candidate Raj Dandekar as a part of a final class project. "That corresponds to the point where we can flatten the curve and start seeing fewer infections."

The last space shuttle launched in 2011 and NASA hasn't sent astronauts to space from US soil since then. That long dry patch is set to end on May 27 when the SpaceX Crew Dragon is scheduled to head to the International Space Station with two crew members on board. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine posted the news on social media Friday along with a short video hyping the event.

The world's biggest trial of drugs to treat Covid-19 patients has been set up in the UK at unprecedented speed, and hopes to have some answers within weeks. From a report: The Recovery trial has recruited over 5,000 patients in 165 NHS hospitals around the UK in a month, ahead of similar trials in the US and Europe, which have a few hundred. "This is by far the largest trial in the world," said Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases and global health at Oxford University, who is leading it. He has previously led Ebola drug trials in west Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The Recovery team expects to be the first to have definitive data. "We're guessing some time in June we may get the results," said Prof Horby. "If it is really clear that there are benefits, an answer will be available quicker." But he warned that in the case of Covid-19, there would be no "magic bullet."

Zeynep Tufekci, writing for The Atlantic: Donald Trump has declared that he would like the United States to stop funding the World Health Organization. It's unclear if he has the authority to change policy in this way, but he's trying. He wants to further break the WHO in ways it's already broken. Trump's ploy to defund the WHO is a transparent effort to distract from his administration's failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic. It would be disastrous too. Many nations, especially poor ones, currently depend on the WHO for medical help and supplies. But it is also true that in the run-up to this pandemic, the WHO failed the world in many ways. However, President Trump's move is precisely the kind of political bullying that contributed to the WHO's missteps.

The WHO failed because it is not designed to be independent. Instead, it's subject to the whims of the nations that fund it and choose its leader. In July 2017, China moved aggressively to elect its current leadership. Instead of fixing any of the problems with the way the WHO operates, Trump seems to merely want the United States to be the bigger bully. Fixing the WHO is crucial, because we desperately need well-functioning global health institutions. But that requires a correct diagnosis of the problem. There is an alternate timeline in which the leadership of the WHO did its job fully and properly, warning the world in time so that effective policies could be deployed across the planet. Instead, the WHO decided to stick disturbingly close to China's official positions, including its transparent cover-ups. In place of a pandemic that is bringing global destruction, just maybe we could have had a few tragic local outbreaks that were contained.

[...] Imagine the WHO took notice of the information it received from Taiwan and Hong Kong. Imagine the WHO also recognized that whistleblower doctors in Wuhan were being threatened with jail time. It would have realized that something important was happening, something worth investigating. It could have immediately, but politely, demanded access to the region around Wuhan and its hospitals. This alternate timeline does not ignore realpolitik. China is not a nation known for cooperating with international agencies when it doesn't want to. (This tendency is not specific to China. A U.S. law nicknamed the "Hague Invasion Act" threatens to invade the International Criminal Court in The Hague should any U.S. service member be indicted.) If China refused access, as it likely would have, the expectation isn't that the WHO officials would just get up and yell "Freedom!" at China's leadership. But there was a path that would recognize the constraints of international diplomacy, but still put the health of billions above all else.

China on Friday raised its coronavirus death toll by 50 percent in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak first emerged, amid accusations that the government had concealed the extent of the epidemic. From a report: Officials placed the new tally at 3,869 deaths from the coronavirus in the central Chinese city, an increase of 1,290 from the previous figure. The number of cumulative confirmed infections in the city was also revised upward to 50,333, an increase of 325. The move appeared to be a response to growing questions about the accuracy of China's official numbers and calls to hold the country responsible for a global health crisis that has killed more than 142,000 people and caused a worldwide economic slowdown. China has been criticized as having initially mismanaged and concealed the extent of the epidemic, though it ultimately swung into action and seemingly tamed the virus. Recently, as other countries have grappled with their own outbreaks, Chinese officials have come under even greater pressure to explain how exactly the epidemic unfolded in Wuhan.

gollum123 shares a report from CNBC: On March 19, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a statewide shelter-in-place order to stem the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee followed four days later. While they were moving aggressively relative to the rest of the country, the top employers in their states were weeks ahead of them. Twitter was the first to move, strongly encouraging its nearly 5,000 employees to work from home on March 1, because of the rapidly spreading coronavirus, and making the order mandatory on March 11. Amazon told its roughly 50,000 Seattle-area employees on March 4 to work from home if they could. Facebook informed its Bay Area workers the next day that it was 'strongly recommending' they work remotely. Over the next week, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce mostly emptied out, keeping about 200,000 people away from the office. Tech has taken a beating in recent years as critics have attacked the industry's growing power, privacy abuses and executive malfeasance. But the industry's early social-distancing moves are a big reason that California and Washington, two early U.S. hotspots of virus outbreak, have bent the infection curve while other states are deep in crisis.

puddingebola shares a report from ESO: Observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have revealed for the first time that a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way moves just as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. Its orbit is shaped like a rosette and not like an ellipse as predicted by Newton's theory of gravity. This long-sought-after result was made possible by increasingly precise measurements over nearly 30 years, which have enabled scientists to unlock the mysteries of the behemoth lurking at the heart of our galaxy.

Located 26,000 light-years from the Sun, Sagittarius A* and the dense cluster of stars around it provide a unique laboratory for testing physics in an otherwise unexplored and extreme regime of gravity. One of these stars, S2, sweeps in towards the supermassive black hole to a closest distance less than 20 billion kilometers (one hundred and twenty times the distance between the Sun and Earth), making it one of the closest stars ever found in orbit around the massive giant. [...] Most stars and planets have a non-circular orbit and therefore move closer to and further away from the object they are rotating around. S2's orbit precesses, meaning that the location of its closest point to the supermassive black hole changes with each turn, such that the next orbit is rotated with regard to the previous one, creating a rosette shape. General Relativity provides a precise prediction of how much its orbit changes and the latest measurements from this research exactly match the theory. This effect, known as Schwarzschild precession, had never before been measured for a star around a supermassive black hole.

The University of Oxford's Big Data Institute found that 56% of the general population, or 80% of current smartphone owners, would need to use a contact-tracing app for it to be effective in helping stop the coronavirus. The BBC reports: If there is lower uptake, academics say the app would still help slow the spread of Covid-19. They add that letting people self-diagnose the illness could be critical. The experts say "speed is of the essence", and that delaying contact tracing by even a day from the onset of symptoms could make the difference between epidemic control and resurgence. "There would be more people receiving notifications as a result of false warnings," explained Prof Christophe Fraser.

The team estimates that 56% of the general population must use the app to halt the outbreak. Prof Fraser said that equated to 80% of all existing smartphone owners, based on data from Ofcom. "That's a very ambitious target," the professor acknowledged. "It's not something that would typically happen for a new app - even an incredibly popular one - but if we can explain that this is a public health intervention, that will be new and different. [...] More than 80% of people surveyed said they were likely to or would install this app when it was explained in detail what it would be doing." Even if fewer people install the app, the team estimates that one infection will be averted for every one to two users.

In his annual shareholder letter, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said that a next step for the company could be regularly testing its employees for the coronavirus, even if they show no symptoms. From a report: "Regular testing on a global scale, across all industries, would both help keep people safe and help get the economy back up and running," he wrote Thursday. Amazon first discussed the concept of developing its own testing capabilities last week. Bezos' public support for this initiative follows a similar push on Wednesday from banking and financial services leaders, who told President Donald Trump in a conference call that more widespread coronavirus testing is needed before the public would feel comfortable going out regularly again, The Wall Street Journal reported. This work is part of early-stage discussions by the White House, state governments and business leaders on how they will start reopening the economy following weeks of restrictive stay-at-home orders and mandated store closures. Along with far more testing, calls for people to regularly use face masks in public places are gaining more traction.

A team of transatlantic scientists, using reanalyzed data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, has discovered an Earth-size exoplanet orbiting in its star's habitable zone, the area around a star where a rocky planet could support liquid water. Phys.Org reports: Scientists discovered this planet, called Kepler-1649c, when looking through old observations from Kepler, which the agency retired in 2018. While previous searches with a computer algorithm misidentified it, researchers reviewing Kepler data took a second look at the signature and recognized it as a planet. Out of all the exoplanets found by Kepler, this distant world -- located 300 light-years from Earth -- is most similar to Earth in size and estimated temperature.

This newly revealed world is only 1.06 times larger than our own planet. Also, the amount of starlight it receives from its host star is 75% of the amount of light Earth receives from our Sun -- meaning the exoplanet's temperature may be similar to our planet's as well. But unlike Earth, it orbits a red dwarf. Though none have been observed in this system, this type of star is known for stellar flare-ups that may make a planet's environment challenging for any potential life. There is still much that is unknown about Kepler-1649c, including its atmosphere, which could affect the planet's temperature. Current calculations of the planet's size have significant margins of error, as do all values in astronomy when studying objects so far away. But based on what is known, Kepler-1649c is especially intriguing for scientists looking for worlds with potentially habitable conditions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: There was a dramatic melting of Greenland's ice sheet in the summer of 2019, researchers have confirmed, in a study that reveals the loss was largely down to a persistent zone of high pressure over the region. The ice sheet melted at a near record rate in 2019, and much faster than the average of previous decades. Figures have suggested that in July alone surface ice declined by 197 gigatons -- equivalent to about 80 million Olympic swimming pools. Now experts have examined the level of melting in more detail, revealing what drove it. Crucially, the team note, the high pressure conditions lasted for 63 of the 92 summer days in 2019, compared with an average of just 28 days between 1981 and 2010. A similar situation was seen in 2012, a record bad year for melting of the ice sheet.

Writing in the journal the Cryosphere, [researchers] report how they used satellite data, climate models and global weather patterns to explore the melting of the surface of the ice sheet last year. Among their findings the team report that almost 96% of the ice sheet underwent melting at some time in 2019, compared with an average of just over 64% between 1981 and 2010. Using models, the pair also found that about 560Gt of meltwater runoff was generated in the summer of 2019. The surface mass balance, the amount of ice the sheet gained from rain and snowfall minus the amount lost through meltwater run off and evaporation, was just 54Gt a year -- about 320Gt a year lower than the average across the earlier decades, and the greatest such drop on record. Further analysis showed the level and distribution of melting to be closely tied to a number of factors, including levels of snowfall and reflection of sunlight -- known as albedo -- as well as cloudiness and absorption of sunlight. All of these, they note, were influenced by the persistent high pressure zone over the ice sheet last summer.

On Tuesday, General Motors revealed that its first ventilators are ready for delivery. "The automaker has a contract with the US Department of Health and Human Services to license-build 30,000 Ventec Life Systems V+ Pro critical care ventilators," reports Ars Technica. "These ventilators are designed to treat the most critically ill patients, who need invasive intubation (tubes inserted into the lungs) as opposed to non-invasive machines like CPAP or BiPAP devices, which are also often referred to as ventilators." Ars Technica reports: GM says that it will ship the first 600 ventilators by the end of April, with "almost half the order" ready by the end of June and the full 30,000 by the end of August. The company has the capacity to produce more if needed. The automaker has leveraged its logistics chain and worked with suppliers to source parts and assemblies, and it has worked closely with Ventec to make these urgently needed medical devices.

Preprint servers and peer-reviewed journals are seeing surging audiences, with many new readers not well versed in the limitations of the latest research findings. From a report: Early on Feb. 1, John Inglis picked up his phone and checked Twitter, as he does most mornings. He was shocked at what fresh hell awaited. Since 2013, Dr. Inglis, executive director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press in New York, has been helping manage a website called bioRxiv, pronounced "bio archive." The site's goal: improve communication between scientists by allowing them to share promising findings months before their research has gone through protracted peer review and official publication. But the mess he was seeing on Twitter suggested a downside of the service provided by the site, known as a preprint server, during the emerging coronavirus pandemic. The social media platform was awash with conspiracy theories positing that the new coronavirus had been engineered by the Chinese government for population control. And the theorists' latest evidence was a freshly submitted paper on bioRxiv from a team of Indian researchers that suggested an "uncanny similarity" between proteins in H.I.V. and the new virus.

Traditionally, the Indian researchers would have submitted a paper to a peer-reviewed journal, and their manuscript would be scrutinized by other scientists. But that process takes months, if not more than a year. BioRxiv, medRxiv -- another site co-founded by Dr. Inglis -- and other preprint servers function as temporary homes that freely disseminate new findings. For scientists on the front lines of the coronavirus response, early glimpses at others' research helps with study of the virus. But there is a growing audience for these papers that are not yet fully baked, and those readers may not understand the studies' limitations. Views and downloads on medRxiv, for instance, have increased more than 100-fold since December, Dr. Inglis says. People with little scientific training, or none at all, are desperate for new knowledge to better inform their day-to-day decisions. The news media wants to keep readers and viewers updated with the latest developments. And agents of disinformation seek to fuel conspiratorial narratives.