Apple Watch will add the ability to detect blood oxygen levels for the first time, 9to5Mac has learned based on an exclusive look at iOS 14 code snippets. From the report: Blood oxygen levels between 95 and 100% are considered healthy; blood oxygen levels below 80% may lead to compromised heart and brain functionality. Risk of respiratory or cardiac arrest is common after continued low blood oxygen saturation. To that end, Apple is developing a new health notification based on the vital measurement. When Apple Watch detects low blood oxygen saturation below a certain threshold, a notification will trigger alerting the user similar to current heart rate notifications.

It's unclear at this point what hardware and software will be required for blood oxygen detection and notifications. It's possible future Apple Watch Series 6 hardware will be required for the new health feature. It could also come to all or newer Apple Watch models with watchOS 7 in the fall. The original Apple Watch hardware is believed to be capable of measuring blood oxygen levels through the built-in heart rate monitor. Apple upgraded the heart rate monitor with Apple Watch Series 4, adding electrocardiogram features, but Apple Watch hasn't offered blood oxygen measurement features yet. Other hardware and software features have also been leaked, such as details about an upcoming iPad Pro with three cameras and Apple's Tile-like item trackers, called AirTags.

PSO J030947.49+271757.31 is the most distant blazar ever observed, originating when the universe was less than 1 billion years old, almost 13 billion years ago. Phys.Org reports: PSO J0309+27, for short, was discovered by a team of researchers led by Silvia Belladitta, a Ph.D. student at the University of Insubria, working for the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan, under the supervision of Alberto Moretti and Alessandro Caccianiga. While they suspected that the object was distant, and observations from the Swift Space Telescope showed that its X-ray power matched that of other blazars, it was the observations obtained with the optical Multi-Double Object Spectrographs (MODS) at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) that confirmed it as a record-breaking distant blazar, the farthest observed in the known universe.

"The spectrum that appeared before our eyes confirmed first that PSO J0309+27 is actually an active galactic nuclei (AGN), or a galaxy whose central nucleus is extremely bright due to the presence in its center of a supermassive black hole fed by the gas and the stars it engulfs," says Belladitta, first author of the paper describing the discovery, published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. "In addition, the data obtained by LBT also confirmed that PSO J0309+27 is really far away from us, according to the shift of the color of its light toward red or redshift with a record value of 6.1, never measured before for a similar object." PSO J0309+27 has therefore proved to be the most powerful persistent radio source in the primordial universe, within the first billion years since its formation. Observations taken by the XRT telescope on board the Swift satellite have also made it possible to establish that, even in X-rays, PSO J0309+27 is the brightest cosmic source ever observed at these distances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The second person ever to be cured of HIV is still free of active virus more than two years on, a study published by medical journal The Lancet HIV revealed on Tuesday. Two and a half years ago, Adam Castillejo -- previously identified as the "London patient" -- finished HIV antiretroviral therapy. He underwent a stem cell transplant to treat lymphoma and his donor carried a mutation known as CCR5-delta 32, which made him resistant to HIV. Researchers said that in treating his lymphoma, they believe Castillejo, now 40, was cured of HIV.

"Our findings show that the success of stem cell transplantation as a cure for HIV, first reported nine years ago in the Berlin patient, can be replicated," said Ravindra Gupta, lead author of the study and a professor in University of Cambridge's clinical microbiology department. Unlike the Berlin patient -- identified later as Timothy Ray Brown -- Castillejo underwent only one stem-cell transplantation instead of two and did not have radiotherapy to his entire body as part of his treatment. Castillejo represents a step toward a less intensive treatment approach, the authors said. Still, given the invasive nature of the experimental treatment, the authors caution its widespread use.

In a letter to the MIT community, President L. Rafael Reif says the university is moving all classes online for the rest of the semester to slow the spread of COVID-19. Here's an excerpt: The overall plan is this:

1. All classes are cancelled for the week of Monday, March 16 through Friday, March 20. Because the following week is spring break, this will allow faculty and instructors two weeks to organize a full transition to online instruction.
2. Online instruction, which some units are already experimenting with this week, will begin for all classes on Monday, March 30, and continue for the remainder of the semester.
3. Undergraduates should not return to campus after spring break. Undergraduates who live in an MIT residence or fraternity, sorority or independent living group (FSILG) must begin packing and departing this Saturday, March 14. We are requiring undergraduates to depart from campus residences no later than noon on Tuesday, March 17. Please see below for details on graduate students.
4.Classes will continue this week as we continue to prepare for this transition.

We are taking this dramatic action to protect the health and safety of everyone at MIT -- staff, students, post-docs and faculty -- and because MIT has an important role in slowing the spread of this disease. As at any residential college, our residence halls and FSILGs put students in close quarters. What's more, the intense and free-flowing collaboration MIT is known for comes with close contact and shared spaces, equipment and supplies. These characteristics, which we cherish in normal times, increase the risk of COVID-19 spreading on our campus. Our plan follows directly from state health guidance that universities take steps to reduce the density of the population on campus and increase social distancing. By doing so, we are doing our part to reduce the spread of the disease overall, while directly reducing risk for our own community -- for departing students, of course, but equally for those of us who continue to work on campus.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Two cybersecurity company employees who attended an annual industry conference last month in San Francisco have tested positive for the coronavirus. At least one is seriously ill with respiratory issues. One of the workers at Exabeam Inc. is a 45-year-old engineer who began experiencing symptoms when he returned home to Connecticut from California on Feb. 28 after attending the RSA cybersecurity conference, his wife said in an email. His condition deteriorated the following week and he was hospitalized in respiratory distress on March 6, she said. The man was placed into a medically induced coma and is now on a ventilator in "guarded condition."

The individual is predisposed for pneumonia due to an underlying heart condition, his wife said. Bloomberg is withholding the man's name to protect his privacy. The second person, who is unidentified, also worked at Exabeam and attended RSA, the Foster City, California-based company said Tuesday in a statement. "While we cannot confirm whether they contracted COVID-19 prior to, at or after the conference, if you came into contact with our staff, please be vigilant in monitoring yourself for symptoms," Exabeam said. The company said it instituted a work-at-home policy for its offices in Foster City and Atlanta.

To combat resistant bacteria and refill the trickling antibiotic pipeline, scientists are getting help from deep learning networks. From a report: Once-powerful antibiotics are losing their efficacy at a disconcerting pace as bacteria evolve immunity to our drugs. At least 700,000 people around the world now die each year from infections that could formerly be treated with antibiotics. A report last year from the United Nations Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance warned that if no new major advances are made by 2050, mortality could leap to 10 million deaths a year. What makes this prognosis all the more dire is that the antibiotic pipeline has slowed to a trickle. In the past two decades, only a few new antibiotics have been found that kill bacteria in novel ways, and rising resistance is a problem for all of them. Meanwhile, traditional methods of identifying antibiotics by screening natural compounds continue to come up short. Because of this, some researchers are now turning from the wet lab to silicon power in hopes of finding an answer.

In the February 20 issue of Cell, one team of scientists announced that they -- and a powerful deep learning algorithm -- had found a totally new antibiotic, one with an unconventional mechanism of action that allows it to fight infections that are resistant to multiple drugs. The compound was hiding in plain sight (as a possible diabetes treatment) because humans didn't know what to look for. But the computer did. Using computers and machine learning to make sense of mountains of biomedical data is nothing new. But the team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by James Collins, who studies applications of systems biology to antibiotic resistance, and Regina Barzilay, an artificial intelligence researcher, achieved success by developing a neural network that avoids scientists' potentially limiting preconceptions about what to look for. Instead, the computer develops its own expertise.

Warning that the number of coronavirus cases in the United States was expected to grow, the Trump administration on Monday evening said that testing for the virus would ramp up quickly in the coming weeks while declining to estimate how many Americans had already been tested for the virus. From a report: The evening news conference at the White House came as the stock market plunged and an increasing number of Americans wondered how the official count of virus cases in the country, still in the mid-three-figures, could remain so low despite the aggressive spread of coronavirus elsewhere. Trump addressed economic concerns, telling reporters his administration would ask Congress to pass payroll tax relief and other quick measures. He also said he was seeking help for hourly-wage workers to ensure they're "not going to miss a paycheck" and "don't get penalized for something that's not their fault."

Since Covid-19 began to spread, Google has aggressively intervened in some of its most popular online services to limit the spread of misinformation. This is a departure for a company that has relied heavily on software and automation to index and rank information throughout its 22-year existence. From a report: Google searches related to the virus now trigger an "SOS Alert," with news from mainstream publications including National Public Radio, followed by information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization displayed prominently. In contrast, a recent search for "flu season" showed the website verywellhealth.com at the top, while another search for "flu" produced tweets, including one from U.S. President Donald Trump comparing coronavirus to the common flu. The coronavirus has killed more than 3,900 people out of 113,000 confirmed cases.

Online platforms have been inundated with rumors and misinformed concerns about the pathogen as it spread west from Asia, particularly in floods of messages on Twitter, according to Carl Bergstrom, a professor at the University of Washington. Google is swept up in this because it has a deal with Twitter to show tweets in search results, especially for queries about live and recent events. "It's really just a churning mess right now," Bergstrom said. On YouTube, Google's video service, the company is trying to quickly remove videos claiming to prevent the virus in place of seeking medical treatment. And some apps related to the virus have been banned from the Google Play app store, prompting complaints from developers who say they just want to help. The company is also giving up revenue.

As COVID-19 spreads rapidly around the world, people are eager to keep up with developments at its epicentre in Wuhan, China. But government censorship, partisan media and misinformation have led many to feel the public isn't seeing a full picture of life in a city on lockdown. So some have developed a creative solution to bypass the gatekeepers and go straight to the source: Tinder. From a report: Most Tinder users use the app to match with people nearby, for obvious reasons. But the world's most used dating app has a premium feature, Passport, that allows a user with Tinder Plus or Tinder Gold memberships to choose to swipe in any location -- like, say, Wuhan -- no matter where they are. And despite Tinder being banned in China, users say they're having luck setting their location to Wuhan, allowing them to match with and chat to residents to hear their perspective on the global story. US-based Twitter user @drethelin tweeted "Setting my tinder to Wuhan so I can get the real scoop on what's going on" on Jan. 28 -- just before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 was a public health emergency.

"A study published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine confirms the recommended 14-day quarantine period for those suspected of having been infected by the COVID-19 virus," writes Slashdot reader RNLockwood. "I'm going to stock up on essentials." From the abstract: Results: There were 181 confirmed cases with identifiable exposure and symptom onset windows to estimate the incubation period of COVID-19. The median incubation period was estimated to be 5.1 days (95% CI, 4.5 to 5.8 days), and 97.5% of those who develop symptoms will do so within 11.5 days (CI, 8.2 to 15.6 days) of infection. These estimates imply that, under conservative assumptions, 101 out of every 10,000 cases (99th percentile, 482) will develop symptoms after 14 days of active monitoring or quarantine.

Limitation: Publicly reported cases may overrepresent severe cases, the incubation period for which may differ from that of mild cases.

Conclusion: This work provides additional evidence for a median incubation period for COVID-19 of approximately 5 days, similar to SARS. Our results support current proposals for the length of quarantine or active monitoring of persons potentially exposed to SARS-CoV-2, although longer monitoring periods might be justified in extreme cases.

According to a new study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers have achieved a new record quantum key distribution (QKD) transmission distance of over 509 kilometers. Phys.Org reports: "Using the sending-or-not-sending twin-field (SNS-TF) protocol, we realized secure quantum key distribution (QKD) over 509 km, which is a new record secure distance in QKD over fiber," Qiang Zhang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "One of the important objectives of our study was to successfully break the absolute key-rate limit of repeater-less QKD, with any measurement device." The SNS-TF protocol was developed and introduced in a previous research effort by some of the researchers who wrote the recent paper. In previous studies, the protocol proved to be highly advantageous for QKD applications, particularly for achieving long distance transmission.

In their recent work, Zhang and his colleagues implemented the SNS-TF QKD protocol by eliciting a single-photon level, first-order interference between two independent lasers. These two independent lasers were combined with a remote frequency locking technique, ultimately enabling QKD transmission over unparalleled distances. In their experiments, the researchers also used superconducting single-photon detectors with high count rate and detection efficiencies. Using their SNS-TF approach, the researchers achieved a secure key rate at 509 km, over seven times higher than the relative repeaterless bound QKD, and with the same detection loss. Remarkably, the key rate they achieved is also higher than that achieved by more traditional QKD protocols running on a perfect repeaterless QKD device.

Amazon on Monday asked employees at its New York and New Jersey offices to work from home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. This comes as the company told employees at its offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle area to work from home, following reports that an Amazon employee in Seattle tested positive for the virus. CNBC reports: The Amazon-owned audiobook company, Audible, is headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. Amazon also employs thousands of people in New York City, including employees at Amazon Web Services and members of sales and marketing teams, among other units. An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC in statement: "We continue to work closely with public and private medical experts to ensure we are taking the right precautions as the situation continues to evolve. This includes recommending that employees who are able to work from home in Seattle/Bellevue, the Bay Area, New York, New Jersey and the Lombardy region/Asti province of Italy do so through the end of March."

Amazon last month restricted all nonessential travel in the U.S. in response to continued spread of the coronavirus. As of Monday afternoon, there are now more than 113,300 cases of the coronavirus worldwide, and at least 3,892 people have died from the virus. There are at least 600 confirmed cases of the virus in the U.S., and at least 22 deaths.

First known U.S. case offers lessons in how and how not to fight the outbreak. From a report: The man who would become Patient Zero for the new coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. appeared to do everything right. He arrived Jan. 19 at an urgent-care clinic in a suburb north of Seattle with a slightly elevated temperature and a cough he'd developed soon after returning four days earlier from a visit with family in Wuhan, China. The 35-year-old had seen a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alert about the virus and decided to get checked. He put on a mask in the waiting room. After learning about his travel, the clinic drew blood and called state and county health officials, who hustled the sample onto an overnight flight to the CDC lab in Atlanta. The patient was told to stay in isolation at home, and health officials checked on him the next morning.

The test came back positive that afternoon, Jan. 20, the first confirmed case in the U.S. By 11 p.m., the patient was in a plastic-enclosed isolation gurney on his way to a biocontainment ward at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, a two-bed unit developed for the Ebola virus. As his condition worsened, then improved over the next several days, staff wore protective garb that included helmets and face masks. Few even entered the room; a robot equipped with a stethoscope took vitals and had a video screen for doctors to talk to him from afar. County health officials located more than 60 people who'd come in contact with him, and none developed the virus in the following weeks. By Feb. 21, he was deemed fully recovered. Somehow, someone was missed. All the careful medical detective work, it's now clear, wasn't enough to slow a virus moving faster than the world's efforts to contain it.

Stanford University canceled in-person classes for the final two weeks of the quarter, switching to online instruction amid rising concern about the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: As the coronavirus first reported in China spreads in the United States, several schools have taken this step as a precaution, hoping to avoid further infections on campus. The University of Washington, which has more than 55,000 students on three campuses, announced Friday that it would switch to virtual classes, and some smaller schools in and near the hard-hit Seattle area, such as Pacific Lutheran University, announced similar plans.

On Sunday, Rice University in Houston canceled in-person classes for the week of March 9 and canceled gatherings of 100 or more people through the end of April. An employee tested positive for covid-19 last week after international travel, university officials said in issuing the alert. [...] In New York, where multiple cases have been identified, Columbia University announced Sunday that classes are canceled Monday and Tuesday and that the university strongly discourages nonessential gatherings of more than 25 people. There are no confirmed cases among Columbia students, faculty or staff, but the Ivy League school's president wrote that someone had been quarantined and that the suspension of classes will allow the school to prepare for a shift to remote classes for the remainder of the week.

Italy has placed up to 16 million people under quarantine as it battles to contain the spread of coronavirus. From a report: Anyone living in Lombardy and 14 other central and northern provinces will need special permission to travel. Milan and Venice are both affected. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also announced the closure of schools, gyms, museums, nightclubs and other venues across the whole country. The measures, the most radical taken outside China, will last until 3 April. Italy has seen the largest number of coronavirus infections in Europe, with the number of confirmed cases jumping by more than 1,200 to 5,883 on Saturday. Among the latest people to test positive is the army's chief of staff. Salvatore Farina said he felt well and was self-isolating.

"ADHD may also bring with it an advantage: the ability to think more creatively," argues a new article in Scientific American: Three aspects of creative cognition are divergent thinking, conceptual expansion and overcoming knowledge constraints... Previous research has established that individuals with ADHD are exceptionally good at divergent thinking tasks, such as inventing creative new uses for everyday objects, and brainstorming new features for an innovative cell phone device. In a new study, college students with ADHD scored higher than non-ADHD peers on two tasks that tapped conceptual expansion and the ability to overcome knowledge constraints. Together with previous research, these new findings link ADHD to all three elements of the creative cognition trio...

ADHD may create difficulties for individuals in many contexts that required focused, sustained attention — such as school, where students are expected to sit still and pay attention. On the other hand, the same distractibility and chaotic mind can give people with ADHD an edge when it comes to creative, original thinking. This new study suggests that ADHD may be especially beneficial when the goal is to create or invent something new without being locked into — and constrained by — old models or conventions.

The innovative, original thinking style of people with ADHD may be a great fit for innovative fields where it's an advantage to be on the cutting edge.

Medical researchers are trying to make history, reports CNBC -- including a 100-person R&D group within AWS: Amazon is working on a cure for the common cold in a years-long, top secret effort called "Project Gesundheit," according to three people familiar with the effort... The team is hoping to develop a vaccine, but is exploring a variety of approaches to the problem. Internally, the effort is sometimes referred to as the "vaccine project...."

Amazon isn't the only organization throwing resources into a cure for the cold. Researchers at Stanford and the University of California are working on a new approach that involves temporarily disabling a single protein inside our cells. Researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which is funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, the physician Priscilla Chan, also chipped into the effort. The researchers behind that group said, in a statement, that they were close to a cure.

An anonymous reader quotes the Seattle Times: Testing for the novel coronavirus in the Seattle area will get a huge boost in the coming weeks as a project funded by Bill Gates and his foundation begins offering home-testing kits that will allow people who fear they may be infected to swab their noses and send the samples back for analysis. Results, which should be available in one to two days, will be shared with local health officials who will notify those who test positive.

Via online forms, infected people can answer questions about their movements and contacts, making it easier for health officials to locate others who may need to be tested or quarantined, as well as to track the virus' spread and identify possible hot spots.

Initially, the lab will be able to conduct about 400 tests a day, eventually expanding to thousands of tests a day, said Scott Dowell, leader of coronavirus response at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The project is ramping up as quickly as possible, but it's not clear exactly when it will launch, he added. Among other things, software needs to be upgraded to handle the expected crush of requests, and a detailed questionnaire finalized for people who request tests. "Although there's a lot to be worked out, this has enormous potential to turn the tide of the epidemic," Dowell said.
The article points out that the kits "will reduce the need for sick people to visit a doctor's office or clinic, lowering the chance of exposing others."

The foundation has already committed up to $100 million to the global response to COVID-19, including up to $20 million to accelerate international efforts to control the spread, up to $20 million to help partners in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia strengthen their response, and up to $60 million to kick-start the development of vaccines and treatments.

"Why did this particle mysteriously disintegrate?" asks Popular Mechanics. Slashdot reader aeropage shared their report: Scientists have proposed a new kind of subatomic particle to explain another particle's mysterious disintegration. The kaon, a special case of meson particle, is made of one quark and one antiquark. All are part of the overall family called hadrons. When kaon particles decay, a very rare few undergo a change that has baffled scientists. Can it be explained by existing physics at all...?

If this kaon decay (de-kaon?) is validated, it represents something new in physics. The style of decay could indicate a new kind of particle altogether, or a new physical force at work to make the novel decay... Kaons have several known common ways of decaying, but the one in this paper is so rare that scientists weren't sure it existed before now. Their model predicted they'd see less than a quarter of one instance of this decay in their sample -- not four, which is a veritable fortune by comparison. What does it mean to see so many more instances?

"If confirmed, this requires physics beyond the standard model to enhance the signal."

The five years between 2013 and 2017 saw a 200% increase in the number of commercially-insured Americans diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or early-onset dementia between the ages of 30 to 64. "While the underlying cause is not clear, advances in technology are certainly allowing for earlier and more definitive diagnosis," says a Blue Cross executive.

The data was collected by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (and its licensee Independence Blue Cross) in a report titled Early-Onset Dementia and Alzheimer's Rates Grow for Younger Americans. schwit1 shared their announcement: Among that group, the average age of a person living with either form of dementia is 49... The number diagnosed with these conditions increased 373% among 30- to 44-year-olds, 311% among 45- to 54-year-olds and 143% among 55- to 64-year-olds from 2013 to 2017...

The study also took a deeper look into early-onset Alzheimer's disease and found that more than 37,000 commercially insured Americans between the ages of 30 and 64 were diagnosed with the condition in 2017 — a 131% jump in diagnoses since 2013.