Thanks to the coronavirus outbreak, working from home is no longer a privilege, it's a necessity. From a report: While factories, shops, hotels and restaurants are warning about plunging foot traffic that is transforming city centers into ghost towns, behind the closed doors of apartments and suburban homes, thousands of businesses are trying to figure out how to stay operational in a virtual world. "It's a good opportunity for us to test working from home at scale," said Alvin Foo, managing director of Reprise Digital, a Shanghai ad agency with 400 people that's part of Interpublic Group. "Obviously, not easy for a creative ad agency that brainstorms a lot in person." It's going to mean a lot of video chats and phone calls, he said. The cohorts working from home are about to grow into armies. At the moment, most people in China are still on vacation for the Lunar New Year. But as Chinese companies begin to restart operations, it's likely to usher in the world's largest work-from-home experiment.

That means a lot more people trying to organize client meetings and group discussions via videochat apps, or discussing plans on productivity software platforms like WeChat Work or Bytedance's Slack-like Lark. The vanguards for the new model of scattered employees are the Chinese financial centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai, cities with central business districts that rely on hundreds of thousands of office workers in finance, logistics, insurance, law and other white-collar jobs. One Hong Kong banker said he's going to extend an overseas vacation, as he can work from anywhere with a laptop and a phone. Others say they are using the time typically spent wining and dining clients to clear their backlog of travel expenses. One said he's shifted focus to deals in Southeast Asia.

"A Russian satellite has positioned itself uncomfortably close to an American spy satellite in orbit around Earth..." reports the Verge, adding that the Russian satellite "has been in constant view of its U.S. target for nearly two weeks now."

An anonymous reader quotes The Drive: Russia has a number of what it calls "space apparatus inspectors" in orbit, which the U.S. government and others warn the Kremlin could use to gather intelligence on other satellites or function as "killer satellites," using various means to damage, disable, or destroy those targets.

On Jan. 30, 2020, Michael Thompson, a graduate student at Purdue University focusing on astrodynamics, posted a detailed thread on Twitter... [H]ow Cosmos 2542 is orbiting now means that it now has a "consistent view" of USA 245. "As I'm typing this, that offset distance shifts between 150 and 300km depending on the location in the orbit," according to Thompson....

One possibility is that it could be using onboard systems, such as cameras or other sensors, to gather information about the [U.S. satellite] KH-11, the capabilities of which are highly classified... It may also be possible to gather electronic or signals intelligence data that could be of additional value. Beyond that, the ability of Cosmos 2542 to get into this position at all is notable and is exactly the kind of orbital maneuvering that the U.S. government had pointed to in the past as evidence of potential "killer satellites." A highly maneuverable, but small satellite could possibly get close enough to disrupt the operation of, disable, or destroy another object in space using a variety of means, ranging from electronic warfare jammers to directed energy weapons, such as a laser...

Russia is known to be interested in anti-satellite capacities and has developed or is developing a number of terrestrial anti-satellite weapons, including ground-based and air-launched interceptors, too. China is pursuing similar developments, as well.


The article points out that is all happening "as the U.S. military is very publicly working to address concerns about the increasing vulnerability of various space-based systems that it relies on heavily... The most obvious expression of this recent push is the creation of U.S. Space Force, an entirely new branch of the U.S. military to focus on American military activities in and related to space, as well as the procurement of satellites and other related systems and infrastructure."

And then late Saturday night, Thompson posted another update on Twitter: that the Russian satellite had made yet another manuever on Friday, "and is now drifting back towards USA 245."

"It's been almost a year since Instagram pledged to reduce the spread of vaccine-related misinformation on its platform. But today, it continues to do the exact opposite," reports the Huffington Post: When HuffPost created a new Instagram account and searched for the term "vaccines" on Saturday, almost all of the top results were anti-vax pages... At the very top was a profile with more than 74,000 followers and posts pushing blatant falsehoods about vaccines and the Wuhan coronavirus. As soon as HuffPost followed that account, Instagram recommended dozens more that, just like it, were promoting dangerous medical misinformation amid a global health emergency.

With its 1 billion users, the role that Facebook-owned Instagram plays in shaping public discourse is not easily understated.

schwit1 quotes Space.com:
The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein's theory of general relativity, a new study finds.

That prediction is a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. It states that space-time will churn around a massive, rotating body. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time.

Satellite experiments have detected frame dragging in the gravitational field of rotating Earth, but the effect is extraordinarily small and, therefore, has been challenging to measure. Objects with greater masses and more powerful gravitational fields, such as white dwarfs and neutron stars, offer better chances to see this phenomenon...

The researchers noted that they used frame dragging to yield insight into the rotating star that caused it. In the future, they said, they can use a similar method to analyze binary neutron stars to learn more about their internal composition, "which, even after more than 50 years of observing them, we do not yet have a handle on," study lead author Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan said. "The density of matter inside a neutron star far exceeds what can be achieved in a lab, so there is a wealth of new physics to be learnt by using this technique to double neutron-star systems."

The scientists detailed their findings online Thursday in the journal Science.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Thai doctors have seen success in treating severe cases of the new coronavirus with combination of medications for flu and HIV, with initial results showing vast improvement 48 hours after applying the treatment, they said on Sunday...

"This is not the cure, but the patientâ(TM)s condition has vastly improved. From testing positive for 10 days under our care, after applying this combination of medicine the test result became negative within 48 hours," Dr. Kriangska Atipornwanich, a lung specialist at Rajavithi, told reporters.

A coronavirus has now infected over 14,380 people worldwide and killed at least 304 people in China, reports the New York Times. But they also note that when the first symptoms appeared in December, Chinese authorities "silenced doctors and others for raising red flags." They played down the dangers to the public, leaving the city's 11 million residents unaware they should protect themselves. They closed a food market where the virus was believed to have started, but didn't broadly curb the wildlife trade.

Their reluctance to go public, in part, played to political motivations as local officials prepared for their annual congresses in January. Even as cases climbed, officials declared repeatedly that there had likely been no more infections.

By not moving aggressively to warn the public and medical professionals, public health experts say, the Chinese government lost one of its best chances to keep the disease from becoming an epidemic. "This was an issue of inaction," said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies China. "There was no action in Wuhan from the local health department to alert people to the threat."

The first case, the details of which are limited and the specific date unknown, was in early December. By the time the authorities galvanized into action on Jan. 20, the disease had grown into a formidable threat.

It is now a global health emergency.
The Times also reports on the last day of 2019, the police even announced "that they were investigating eight people for spreading rumors about the outbreak."

And days later Wuhan's mayor spoke to the Communist Party-run legislatures, promising that his city would soon host a World Health Expo.

There's a North American tradition that says there'll be six more weeks of winter if a groundhog can see his shadow (due to clear skies) on February 2nd.

And while it's been honored every year with a ceremony in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania since 1887, PETA is now suggesting that the event's organizers should stop using a live groundhog -- and replace him with a robot. The Morning Caller reports:
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said in a news release Tuesday it sent a letter calling for the current incarnation of Punxsutawney Phil to be sent to a "reputable sanctuary" to live out the remainder of his life. Phil, arguably the world's most famous groundhog, takes part in a ceremony every Feb. 2 at Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney. His handlers, also known as the Inner Circle, host festivities that culminate at 7:20 a.m., when they pull Punxsutawney Phil from a decorative stump so he can predict an early spring or six more weeks of winter.

"Gentle, vulnerable groundhogs are not barometers," PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said in the release. "PETA is offering the club a win-win situation: Breathe life into a tired tradition and finally do right by a long-suffering animal... An AI Phil would renew interest in Punxsutawney, generating a great deal of buzz, much like Sony's robot dog 'aibo,' which walks, plays, misbehaves, and responds to commands...

"By creating an AI Phil, you could keep Punxsutawney at the center of Groundhog Day but in a much more progressive way."
One LiveScience article points out that "you'll be better off flipping a coin than going by the groundhog's predictions."

Or, as one PETA blog post explains, "To predict the weather you need a robot, not a terrified groundhog."

"The vegan diet is low in — or, in some cases, entirely devoid of — several important brain nutrients," argues the BBC. "Could these shortcomings be affecting vegans' abilities to think?"

omfglearntoplay shared their article: According to the latest statistics, there are around 375 million vegetarians on the planet. In the West, veganism has ditched the hippie stigma to become one of the fastest-growing millennial trends; in the United States, it grew by 600% between 2014 and 2017. Meanwhile in India, meat-free diets have been mainstream since the 6th Century BCE...

[T]he holes in our current understanding of what the brain needs to be healthy could potentially be a major problem for vegans, since it's hard to artificially add a nutrient to your diet, if scientists haven't discovered its worth yet... "I think we need a lot more research into vegan nutrition and health," says Heather Russell, a dietitian from The Vegan Society. "As far as we can tell, it's possible to lead a healthy life as a vegan — certainly there are people who thrive on a vegan diet." Though it's important to take supplements, she explains that a person's cardiovascular and brain health are inextricably linked, and vegans tend to have healthier hearts...

Nathan Cofnas, a biologist from Oxford University, takes a harsher view. Though vegans can take supplements, he thinks it's unrealistic to expect that they all will. Consequently, he finds the recent shift towards plant-based diets troubling, though he's sympathetic to the arguments for doing so. "Without question, veganism can cause B12 and iron deficiencies, and without question they affect your intelligence," he says.
The BBC does cite various studies about specific nutrients, but ultimately drew an angry response from a microbiologist who describes themself as "a vegan with a Ph.D., who works alongside many sharp and bright vegans," and complains the BBC is using outdated data, starting with the theory that meat consumption allowed humans to evolve larger brains. This is now considered outdated thinking as recent research, published in the journal Nature, refutes this, arguing that a higher-quality diet, including some meat but also improved by cooking, coupled with the energy saved by walking upright, growing more slowly and reproducing later, fuelled the growth in brain size. Prehistoric humans ate some meat but that alone didn't make them smart...

Sure vegans need to ensure a good B12 intake but so should everyone, as low levels of B12 are common in the entire population, regardless of diet. Everyone over 50 in the U.S. is advised to take B12 supplements and meat and dairy only contain it because animals are fed or injected with supplements... [A]ll major health bodies agree that well-planned vegan diets are appropriate for all people at all ages. For example: "It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics [America's largest organization of nutrition professionals] that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases...."

I recently wrote a piece for Viva!'s magazine Viva!life about the trend in vegan-bashing articles and this FOMO (fear of missing out) approach is popular click-bait claptrap. However, articles like this do nutrition journalism no favours as misleading the public is irresponsible and dangerous.

sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: A new close-up of the turbulent boiling plasma of the solar surface is the debut image of the largest telescope ever built for staring at the Sun. Sporting a 4-meter-wide mirror — twice the size of any existing solar scope—and a vantage point 3000 meters up on the summit of Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui — the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) will reveal unprecedented detail of processes that channel energy from the Sun's interior into its atmosphere, the corona.

Researchers hope that by zooming in on cell-like structures — each about the size of Texas — they can learn what causes the Sun to launch powerful flares out into space, potentially causing damage to Earth's satellites, power grids, and communications. Such information could help scientists give warnings of such events days rather than minutes ahead.

Long-time Slashdot reader Kreuzfeld writes: Thursday marks the final mission of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Conceived of as an infrared-optimized "Great Observatory," Spitzer has spent the last 6002 days providing Earthlings with an unprecedented view into other galaxies, our own solar system, and (unexpected to its designers!) planets around other stars. But in its Earth-trailing solar orbit, Spitzer is now over 1.5 astronomical units from the Earth: radio transmissions are increasingly difficult, and (more importantly) Spitzer's operating costs were ultimately deemed to be too high relative to its science output.

Spitzer's infrared capabilities won't be replaced until 2021 (at the earliest) when NASA's James Webb Space Telescope — an even larger successor to Spitzer and the Hubble — is anticipated to launch.

Bon voyage, Spitzer — we'll see you again in about 30 years when our orbits meet up again.

sciencehabit writes: Most days, Willy van Wingerden spends a few free hours walking by the sea not far from the Dutch town of Monster. Here, the cheerful nurse has plucked more than 500 ancient artifacts from the broad, windswept beach known as the Zandmotor, or "sand engine." She has found Neanderthal tools made of river cobbles, bone fishhooks, and human remains thousands of years old. Her favorite beach -- made of material dredged from the sea bottom offshore -- preserves traces of a lost world, when sea levels were lower, and what is now the North Sea was a rich lowland, home to modern humans and Neanderthals. While she and other dedicated amateurs amass artifacts, scientists are applying new methods to date the finds and sequence any genetic traces, as well as to map the sea floor and analyze sediment cores. Together, researchers and collectors are bringing to light a vanished homeland of ancient Europeans.

Writing in Analytical Chemistry, Paige Hinners and Young Jin Lee of Iowa State University say they have figured out an accurate way to data to within 24 hours when a fingerprint under a week old was made -- and thus whether it is associated with a crime temporally, as well as spatially. The Economist reports: They knew from work conducted by other laboratories that the triglyceride oils contained in fingerprints change by oxidation over the course of time. That provides an obvious way to date prints. The problem is that the techniques which have been applied to analyze these oils are able to distinguish age only crudely. In practice, they can determine whether or not a print is over a week old, but nothing else. Dr Hinners and Dr Lee wondered if higher precision could be obtained by thinking a bit more about oxidation. Oxygen molecules in the air come in two varieties. Most have a pair of atoms but some, known as ozone, have three. Though far rarer than diatomic oxygen, ozone is more reactive and also reacts in ways different from those of its two-atomed cousin. The two researchers therefore decided to focus their attentions on ozonolysis, as triatomic oxidation is known.

Triglycerides, as their name suggests, are three-tailed molecules. Each tail is a chain of carbon atoms, with hydrogen atoms bonded to the carbons. The chains are held together by bonds between the carbon atoms. These are of two varieties, known as single and double bonds. Single bonds are, in chemistry-speak, saturated, and double bonds unsaturated. By extension, molecules with one or more double bonds in them are also referred to as unsaturated, while those with only single bonds are called saturated. Unsaturated bonds are more reactive, and it is here that ozonolysis does its work. Ozone breaks up triglycerides at their double bonds, with one or more of the ozone's oxygen atoms becoming attached to the carbon chain, to create new chemical species. In principle, this should result in a gradual loss of unsaturated triglycerides and a concomitant rise in the reaction products of ozonolysis. And that, in practice, is what Dr Hinners and Dr Lee found.

The Trump administration on Friday declared a public healthy emergency over the coronavirus outbreak and said any foreign national who has traveled within China in the last 14 days will not be allowed to enter the country. The Wall Street Journal reports: The announcement [from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar] came as stock markets tumbled amid concern about how the impact of the virus could slow global growth. At the same time, Mr. Azar sought to minimize fears about the virus spreading further in the U.S. "I hope that people will see that their government is taking responsible steps to protect them," he said at a White House briefing. "The risk is low... but our job is to keep that risk low."

There are six confirmed cases in the U.S. and 191 people are under investigation, officials said. Meantime, Americans who were evacuated from the epicenter of the China coronavirus outbreak will be quarantined for 14 days at a U.S. military base to prevent any spread of the infectious disease, federal health authorities said Friday. The quarantine -- the first in the U.S. ordered by the federal government in roughly 50 years -- came as the U.K. and Russia each reported their first cases of the dangerous virus, while other countries moved to limit air traffic with China as the number of people infected there approached 10,000. The quarantine applies to 195 U.S. citizens evacuated Wednesday from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak, and brought to the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, Calif., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The State Department also on Friday advised Americans in China to consider leaving and requested all nonessential U.S. government personnel to postpone travel there.

The State Department's "Do Not Travel" advice placed China on the same list as Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela. It follows the WHO's designation Thursday of the coronavirus as a global public-health emergency.

Additionally, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines said they will suspend all U.S.-China flights for at least several weeks due to the outbreak. Delta's suspensions will begin Feb. 6 and last through April 30.

UPDATE (2/8/2020): NASA technicians were able to reach Voyager 2, a whopping 11.5 billion miles from earth, and get it fully back online and collecting scientific data again.

Below is Slashdot's original story from January 31st...

Last Saturday, Voyager 2's software shut down all five of the scientific instruments onboard because the spacecraft was consuming way too much power. Engineers at NASA don't know what triggered this energy spike and are currently trying to get the interstellar probe, which was launched in 1977, back to normal operations. Its primary mission was supposed to last five years. In 2018, it officially left the solar system. In order to keep the spacecraft running properly 42 years later, NASA has had to carefully manage power consumption for the instruments and the probe's heaters. From a report: About 11.5 billion miles away, Voyager 2 was supposed to make a scheduled 360-degree rotation that would help calibrate its magnetometer (used to measure magnetic fields). The spacecraft delayed this move for still unknown reasons, leaving two other internal systems running at high power. The onboard software decided to offset this power deficit by shutting down the five scientific instruments still working. NASA engineers shut down one of the power-hungry systems and turned the science instruments back on. But the spacecraft is still not cleared for normal operations and is not collecting any new data for now. [...] It takes 17 hours for data from Earth to get to Voyager 2, and vice versa. This lag means it will take several days to solve the spacecraft's woes. As it is, the radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which powers the spacecraft, is only expected to last another five years before the plutonium-238 can no longer provide enough heat to power the probe's instruments, so Voyager 2 is on its last hurrah anyway.

Delta Air Lines and American Airlines said on Friday that they will suspend all U.S.-China flights for at least several weeks due to the coronavirus outbreak. Delta on Friday said its China service suspension will begin Feb. 6 and last through April 30, but it will continue to operate the service until then to "ensure customers looking to exit China have options to do so." From a report: Dozens of carriers including United, Cathay Pacific, British Airways and others have slashed or suspended service to China because of the outbreak. Delta was the first in the U.S. to suspend service altogether. Large companies spanning industries from technology to packaged food have suspended business trips to the country because of coronavirus, driving down demand for flights to China. Time has a more comprehensive list.

The World Health Organization on Thursday declared an international public health emergency over the deadly new coronavirus that has hit China hard. From a report: The announcement comes as nearly a hundred cases have been spotted in countries outside of China, including the first case of human-to-human transmission in the U.S., also reported on Thursday. The WHO's decision on the outbreak of virus, known as 2019-nCoV, was made following a lengthy discussion by experts assembled by the agency. Last week, the same committee deliberated for two days about whether to call for a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), as it's officially known, but declined to do so. While China has reported a large surge of cases since then -- over 7,700 cases and 170 deaths as of early January 30 -- the move to now call for an international emergency was motivated by the worsening situation outside of China, according to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. As of Thursday, there have been 98 cases reported outside of mainland China in at least 18 countries, but no deaths outside of China. "The main reason for this declaration is not because of what is happening in China, but because of what is happening in other countries," Tedros said at the press conference announcing the PHEIC today. "We don't know what sort of damage this virus could do if it were to spread in a country with a weaker health system. We must act now to help countries prepare for that possibility."

davidwr writes: Remember the aurora-that-wasn't called STEVE from last April? Well, amateur stargazers in Finland are at it again. This time it's for a new kind of aurora dubbed "the dunes." These new aurora are thought to be an example of a "mesosphereic bore" in which oxygen is exited by the solar wind or possibly gravity waves. The original paper can be found at here. News of it can be found at ScienceAlert, Live Science, and probably elsewhere. The researchers say the dunes emerge at an altitude of about 62 miles in the upper reaches of the mesosphere, and are visible simultaneously from different locations in Finland and Sweden.

The University of Helsinki has posted a video of the new type of Aurora Borealis on their YouTube channel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: On Monday, researchers from Japan's Osaka University announced the successful completion of a first-of-its-kind heart transplant. Rather than replacing their patient's entire heart with a new organ, these researchers placed degradable sheets containing heart muscle cells onto the heart's damaged areas -- and if the procedure has the desired effect, it could eventually eliminate the need for some entire heart transplants.

To grow the heart muscle cells, the team started with induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These are stem cells that researchers create by taking an adult's cells -- often from their skin or blood -- and reprogramming them back into their embryonic-like pluripotent state. At that point, researchers can coax the iSP cells into becoming whatever kind of cell they'd like. In the case of this Japanese study, the researchers created heart muscle cells from the iSP cells before placing them on small sheets. The patient, which suffers from ischemic cardiomyopathy, will be monitored for the next year. If all goes well, the researchers hope to conduct the same procedure on nine other people suffering from the same condition within the next three years.

A reader shares a report from MIT Technology Review: Astronomers have just released the highest-resolution image of the sun. Taken by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Maui, it gives us an unprecedented view of our nearest star and brings us closer to solving several long-standing mysteries. The new image demonstrates the telescope's potential power. It shows off a surface that's divided up into discrete, Texas-size cells, like cracked sections in the desert soil. You can see plasma oozing off the surface, rising into the air before sinking back into darker lanes.

"We have now seen the smallest details on the largest object in our solar system," says Thomas Rimmele, the director of DKIST. The new image was taken December 10, when the telescope achieved first light. It is still technically under construction, with three more instruments set to come online. When formal observations begin in July, DKIST, with its 13-foot mirror, will be the most powerful solar telescope in the world. Located on Haleakala (the tallest summit on Maui), the telescope will be able to observe structures on the surface of the sun as small as 18.5 miles (30 kilometers). This resolution is over five times better than that of DKIST's predecessor, the Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope in New Mexico.

After several weather delays, SpaceX successfully launched its fourth batch of Starlink satellites into orbit and nailed a rocket landing today. Space.com reports: A sooty Falcon 9 rocket -- which made its third flight with this launch -- roared to life at 9:06 a.m. EST (1406 GMT), lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here in Florida. The rocket carried 60 more Starlink satellites for SpaceX's growing constellation, the second such launch by the company this month. The satellites all successfully deployed about an hour after liftoff.

The star of this mission, the Falcon 9 first stage dubbed B1051.3 by SpaceX, previously lofted a Crew Dragon capsule as part of the company's uncrewed mission to the space station (Demo-1) as well as a trio of Earth-observing satellites for Canada. Following the successful launch, the rocket's first stage gently touched down on a SpaceX's drone ship landing platform "Of Course I Still Love You" in the Atlantic Ocean, marking the company's 49th booster recovery. [...] Today's launch is part of SpaceX's goal of connecting the globe with its Starlink network. Each satellite is identical, weighing in at roughly 485 lbs. (220 kg), and is part of a larger network that aims to provide internet coverage to the world below. With this launch, it brings SpaceX's burgeoning constellation up to 240, making it the largest in orbit to date.