A "turbocharged" flu vaccine created by a computer with artificial intelligence in South Australia is set to be trialed in the United States. ABC reports: Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky has told the ABC the computer running a program called Sam invented the new drug on its own, in what he claimed was a world first. "We essentially showed all of that to the AI program called Sam and then Sam came up with its own suggestion of what might be an effective adjuvant, which we then took and tested, and sure enough, it worked." The chosen strains are decided by the World Health Organization, according to which ones were prevalent in the previous northern or southern hemisphere flu seasons. This year's Australian vaccine for people aged over 65 contains a component in it which boosts their immune system.

Facebook said on Tuesday that it's downgrading content that makes dubious health claims, including posts that try to sell or promote "miracle cures." From a report: Big technology platforms have faced growing criticism over the spread of fake or misleading content. Reports emerged last year that Facebook had been featuring homemade cancer "cures" more prominently than genuine information from renowned organizations, such as cancer research charities. And a few months back, a separate report found that YouTube videos were promoting bleach as a cure for autism. Facebook also recently said it would crack down on anti-vaccine content. The fight against digital misinformation is ongoing, and it isn't limited to spurious health cures. "In order to help people get accurate health information and the support they need, it's imperative that we minimize health content that is sensational or misleading," Facebook product manager Travis Yeh wrote in a blog post.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A Rutgers-led study sheds light on one of the most enduring mysteries of science: How did metabolism -- the process by which life powers itself by converting energy from food into movement and growth -- begin? To answer that question, the researchers reverse-engineered a primordial protein and inserted it into a living bacterium, where it successfully powered the cell's metabolism, growth and reproduction, according to the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers looked at a class of proteins called ferredoxins, which support metabolism in bacteria, plants and animals by moving electricity through cells. These proteins have different, complex forms in today's living things, but researchers speculate they all arose from a much simpler protein that was present in the ancestor of all life.

Similar to the ways biologists compare modern birds and reptiles to draw conclusions about their shared ancestor, the researchers compared ferredoxin molecules that are present in living things and, using computer models, designed ancestral forms that may have existed at an earlier stage in the evolution of life. That research led to their creation of a basic version of the protein -- a simple ferredoxin that is able to conduct electricity within a cell and that, over eons of evolution, could have given rise to the many types that exist today. Then, to prove their model of the ancient protein could actually support life, they inserted it into a living cell. They took the genome of E. coli bacteria, removed the gene it uses to create ferredoxin in nature, and spliced in a gene for their reverse-engineered protein. The modified E. coli colony survived and grew although more slowly than normal.

A reader shares a report from Phys.Org: Hubble offers a special view of the double star system Eta Carinae's expanding gases glowing in red, white, and blue. This is the highest resolution image of Eta Carinae taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Imagine slow-motion fireworks that started exploding nearly two centuries ago and haven't stopped since then. This is how you might describe this double star system located 7500 light-years away in the constellation Carina (The Ship's Keel). In 1838 Eta Carinae underwent a cataclysmic outburst called the Great Eruption, quickly escalating to become in 1844 the second brightest star in the sky by April of that year. The star has since faded, but this new view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows that the spectacular display is still ongoing, and reveals details that have never been seen before.

This latest image was created using Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 to map warm magnesium gas glowing in ultraviolet light (shown in blue). Scientists have long known that the outer material thrown off in the 1840s eruption has been heated by shock waves generated when it crashed into material previously ejected from the star . The team who captured this new image were expecting to find light from magnesium coming from the complicated array of filaments seen in the light from glowing nitrogen (shown in red). Instead, a whole new luminous magnesium structure was found in the space between the dusty bipolar bubbles and the outer shock-heated nitrogen-rich filaments. Another striking feature of the image is the streaks visible in the blue region outside the lower-left bubble. These streaks appear where the star's light rays poke through the dust clumps scattered along the bubble's surface. Wherever the ultraviolet light strikes the dense dust, it leaves a long thin shadow that extends beyond the lobe into the surrounding gas. You can view the images via a YouTube video from HubbleESA.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Time: The amount of ice circling Antarctica is suddenly plunging from a record high to record lows, baffling scientists. Floating ice off the southern continent steadily increased from 1979 and hit a record high in 2014. But three years later, the annual average extent of Antarctic sea ice hit its lowest mark, wiping out three-and-a-half decades of gains -- and then some, a NASA study of satellite data shows. Serreze and other outside experts said they don't know if this is a natural blip that will go away or more long-term global warming that is finally catching up with the South Pole. Antarctica hasn't showed as much consistent warming as its northern Arctic cousin.

At the polar regions, ice levels grow during the winter and shrink in the summer. Around Antarctica, sea ice averaged 4.9 million square miles (12.8 million square kilometers) in 2014. By 2017, it was a record low of 4.1 million square miles (10.7 million square kilometers, according to the study in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Antarctic sea ice increased slightly in 2018, but still was the second lowest since 1979. Even though ice is growing this time of year in Antarctica, levels in May and June this year were the lowest on record, eclipsing 2017, according to the ice data center.

sciencehabit shares a report: The day that squeamish humans -- and exterminators -- have long feared may have come at last: Cockroaches are becoming invincible. Or at least German cockroaches (Blattella germanica) are, according to a new study. Researchers have found that these creatures, which have long been a prevalent urban pest, are becoming increasingly resistant to almost every kind of chemical insecticide. Not all insecticides are created equal. Some degrade the nervous system, whereas others attack the exoskeleton; they also have to be left out for varying amounts of time. But many insects, including cockroaches, have evolved resistance to at least one of the most commonly-used insecticides. And because cockroaches live only for about 100 days, that resistance can evolve quickly, with genes from the most resistant cockroaches being passed to the next generation.

To test resistance in German cockroaches, researchers treated three different colonies in multiple apartment buildings in Indiana and Illinois over the course of 6 months. The populations were tested for their level of resistance to three different insecticides: abamectin, boric acid, and thiamethoxam. One treatment used all three pesticides, one after another, for 3 months before repeating the cycle. In another treatment, researchers used a mixture of insecticides over the full 6 months. A final treatment scenario used just one chemical that the selected roach population had a low resistance to for the entire time. Regardless of the different treatments, the size of most of the cockroach populations didn't drop over time, the researchers wrote last month in Scientific Reports.

Gene Kranz may be the most famous flight director in NASA's history. He directed the actual landing portion of the first mission to put men on the moon, Apollo 11, and led Mission Control in saving the crew of Apollo 13 after an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the lunar surface. Now Kranz, 85, has completed another undertaking: the reopening of Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. From a report: The room where Kranz directed some of NASA's most historic missions, heralding U.S. exploration of space, was decommissioned in 1992. Since then, it had become a stop on guided tours of the space center but had fallen into disrepair. Kranz led a $5 million multiyear effort to restore Mission Control in time for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20.

"I walked into that room last Monday for the first time when it was fully operational, and it was dynamite. I literally wept," Kranz said in an interview with NPR. "The emotional surge at that moment was incredible. I walked down on the floor, and when we did the ribbon-cutting the last two days, believe it or not, I could hear the people talking in that room from 50 years ago. I could hear the controllers talking." The room also brought back memories for Kranz of a shared sense of purpose. "That group of people united in pursuit of a cause, and basically the result was greater than the sum of the parts. There was a chemistry that was formed," Kranz said. "[The room] also has a meaning related to the American psyche, that what America will dare, America will do," Kranz said.

The hospital technology, typically used to identify human ailments, captured perhaps the world's smallest magnetic resonance image. weiserfireman shares a report: Different microscopy techniques allow scientists to see the nucleotide-by-nucleotide genetic sequences in cells down to the resolution of a couple atoms as seen in an atomic force microscopy image. But scientists at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. and the Institute for Basic Sciences in Seoul, have taken imaging a step further, developing a new magnetic resonance imaging technique that provides unprecedented detail, right down to the individual atoms of a sample [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. The technique relies on the same basic physics behind the M.R.I. scans that are done in hospitals. When doctors want to detect tumors, measure brain function or visualize the structure of joints, they employ huge M.R.I. machines, which apply a magnetic field across the human body. This temporarily disrupts the protons spinning in the nucleus of every atom in every cell. A subsequent, brief pulse of radio-frequency energy causes the protons to spin perpendicular to the pulse. Afterward, the protons return to their normal state, releasing energy that can be measured by sensors and made into an image.

But to gather enough diagnostic data, traditional hospital M.R.I.s must scan billions and billions of protons in a person's body, said Christopher Lutz, a physicist at IBM. So he and his colleagues decided to pack the power of an M.R.I. machine into the tip of another specialized instrument known as a scanning tunneling microscope to see if they could image individual atoms. The tip of a scanning tunneling microscope is just a few atoms wide. And it moves along the surface of a sample, it picks up details about the size and conformation of molecules. The researchers attached magnetized iron atoms to the tip, effectively combining scanning-tunneling microscope and M.R.I. technologies.

Lancaster University has announced a "universal computer memory" breakthrough combining the fast, low-energy storage of DRAM memory with the robustness of flash memory. They're now envisioning ultra-low energy consumption computers which would never need to boot up -- and can "instantaneously and imperceptibly" slip into an energy-saving sleep mode.

Long-time Slashdot reader Hrrrg pointed us to this announcement: A U.S. patent has been awarded for the electronic memory device with another patent pending, while several companies have expressed an interest or are actively involved in the research. The inventors of the device used quantum mechanics to solve the dilemma of choosing between stable, long-term data storage and low-energy writing and erasing... [Specifically, "by exploiting the quantum-mechanical properties of an asymmetric triple resonant-tunnelling barrier."]

Physics Professor Manus Hayne of Lancaster University said, "Our device has an intrinsic data storage time that is predicted to exceed the age of the Universe, yet it can record or delete data using 100 times less energy than DRAM."
The announcement predicts the technology could reduce peak power consumption in data centers by 20%.

An anonymous reader quotes the Pew Research Center: New York recently became the fifth state -- after California, Maine, Mississippi and West Virginia -- to enact a law requiring children in public school to be vaccinated unless they have a valid medical reason. Legislatures in several other states are considering similar legislation. Most states (44), however, allow children to be exempt from vaccinations due to religious concerns, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. And one state, Minnesota, allows for a broader exemption based on personal beliefs but does not explicitly mention religion... Among the states that specifically allow religious exemptions to vaccinations, 15 also allow exemptions for any type of nonreligious personal belief, according to the Center's analysis...

The action in New York came after the state became the center of a nationwide measles outbreak that has sickened more than 1,000 Americans in 28 states so far this year.

SpaceX says 57 of its 60 broadband data satellites are now communicating with their ground stations -- and that this grants them special privileges when other companies launch their own satellite telecommunication networks. An anonymous reader quotes GeekWire: In an emailed update, SpaceX said Starlink is ready to go into a testing phase that involves streaming videos and playing video games via satellite.... "Now that the majority of the satellites have reached their operational altitude, SpaceX will begin using the constellation to start transmitting broadband signals, testing the latency and capacity by streaming videos and playing some high-bandwidth video games using gateways throughout North America," SpaceX said... SpaceX said "Starlink is now the first NGSO [non-geosynchronous satellite orbit] system to operate in the Ku-band and communicate with U.S. ground stations, demonstrating the system's potential to provide fast, reliable internet to populations around the world."

That statement isn't intended merely as a marketing boast: In documents filed earlier this month with the Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX says its "first to operate" status with the FCC means it can "select its frequencies first" if there's a conflict with other satellite telecommunication networks in low Earth orbit. SpaceX's claim on that score has set off a flurry of regulatory filings from its rivals in the market for satellite broadband services, including the international OneWeb consortium and Canada's biggest satellite operator, Telesat.

In one of this month's filings, OneWeb charged that SpaceX was being "irresponsible" by going ahead with a Ku-band system under conditions that would interfere with OneWeb's previously launched [six] satellites. But SpaceX shrugged off OneWeb's objections, as well as Kepler's. It said neither OneWeb nor Kepler qualified for the FCC's first-choice status because their ground stations weren't in the U.S... The exchange of FCC filings illustrates how tangled the regulatory environment for satellite internet broadband services can get. And things could get even more tangled if additional players including Amazon and Boeing join the fray.

Thelasko quotes a surprising CNN story about spinach: A study released by Freie Universitat Berlin suggests that ecdysterone, a chemical found in the leafy green vegetable, has a similar effect to steroids and should be added to the list of substances banned in sport, CNN affiliate RTL reported.

The researchers ran a study involving 46 athletes who trained three times per week for 10 weeks. Some were given ecdysterone and others a placebo. Those who took ecdysterone saw their performance improve by three times as much as those who did not...

Co-author Francesco Botre, director of the Italian anti-doping agency (FMSI), told CNN that the team are now investigating ways to test for ecdysterone. Anti-doping agencies are currently not allowed to test for ecdysterone because it isn't on the list of banned substances, he explained. This, combined with its greater than expected effect on performance, is a worry. "It's very powerful because it's invisible," said Botre. "It's not on the list."

Long-time Slashdot reader tomhath shares some big bacteria news from Harvard Medical School: Researchers from Joslin Diabetes Center determined Veillonella metabolizes lactic acid produced by exercise and converts it into propionate, a short chain fatty acid. The human body then utilizes that propionate to improve exercise capacity...

"It creates this positive feedback loop. The host is producing something that this particular microbe favors. Then in return, the microbe is creating something that benefits the host," Aleksandar D. Kostic Ph.D. says. "This is a really important example of how the microbiome has evolved ways to become this symbiotic presence in the human host."
By Friday, CNBC was reporting their research "could lead to a probiotic-like supplement that 'regular joes' could use to enhance their performance in a few years." "The future of fitness is here and it's something that we're rapidly developing," Jonathan Scheiman, former Harvard postdoctoral fellow and CEO and co-founder of FitBiomics, tells CNBC Make It. "We want to translate this into consumer products to promote health and wellness [to the masses]..." [The researchers] found the mice given Veillonella ran 13% longer on a treadmill compared to mice who were not given the bacteria. "It might not seem like a huge number, but I definitely think its biologically significant and certainly if you ask a marathon runner, if they could increase their running ability by 13% -- I think that they will be generally interested," Aleksandar Kostic, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of microbiology at the Joslin Diabetes Center tells CNBC Make It.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the now-defunct biotech unicorn Theranos, will face trial in federal court next summer with penalties of up to 20 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines. Jury selection will begin July 28, 2020, according to U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila, who announced the trial will commence in August 2020 in a San Jose federal court Friday morning. Holmes and former Theranos president Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani were indicted by a grand jury last June with 11 criminal charges in total. Two of those charges were conspiracy to commit wire fraud (against investors, and against doctors and patients). The remaining nine are actual wire fraud, with amounts ranging from the cost of a lab test to $100 million. Bloomberg says Holmes' legal team plans to argue that The Wall Street Journal's John Carreyrou "had an undue influence on federal regulators," and "went beyond reporting the Theranos story."

"The jury should be aware that an outside actor, eager to break a story, and portray the story as a work of investigative journalism, was exerting influence on the regulatory process in a way that appears to have warped the agencies' focus on the company and possibly biased the agencies' findings against it," her attorneys wrote, per Bloomberg. "The agencies' interactions with Carreyrou thus go to the heart of the government's case."

Mold spores commonly found aboard the International Space Station (ISS) turn out to be radiation resistant enough to survive 200 times the X-ray dose needed to kill a human being. Based on experiments by a team of researchers led by Marta Cortesao, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, the new study indicates that sterilizing interplanetary spacecraft may be much more difficult than previously thought. New Atlas reports: The researchers exposed samples of Aspergillus and Pennicillium spores to X-rays, heavy ions, and high-frequency ultraviolet light of the kinds and intensities found in space. Such radiation damages DNA and breaks down cell structures, but the spores survived X-rays up to 1,000 gray, heavy ions at 500 gray, and UV rays up to 3,000 joules per meter squared. Gray is a measurement of radiation exposure based on the absorption of one joule of radiation energy per kilogram of matter. To place the results into perspective, five gray will kill a person and 0.7 gray is how much radiation the crew of a Mars mission would receive on a 180-day mission.

Since mold spores can already survive heat, cold, chemicals, and drying out, being able to take on radiation as well poses new challenges. It means that not only will manned missions have to put a lot of effort into keeping the ship clean and healthy, it also means that unmanned planetary missions, which must be free of terrestrial organisms to prevent contaminating other worlds, will be harder to sterilize. But according to Cortesao there is a positive side to this resiliency. Since fungal spores are hard to kill, they'd be easier to carry along and grow under controlled conditions in space, so they can be used as raw materials or act as biological factories.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain and the U.S. has announced that they have discovered a new property of light -- self-torque. Their findings have been published in the journal Science. Phys.Org reports: Scientists have long known about such properties of light as wavelength. More recently, researchers have found that light can also be twisted, a property called angular momentum. Beams with highly structured angular momentum are said to have orbital angular momentum (OAM), and are called vortex beams. They appear as a helix surrounding a common center, and when they strike a flat surface, they appear as doughnut-shaped. In this new effort, the researchers were working with OAM beams when they found the light behaving in a way that had never been seen before.

The experiments involved firing two lasers at a cloud of argon gasâ"doing so forced the beams to overlap, and they joined and were emitted as a single beam from the other side of the argon cloud. The result was a type of vortex beam. The researchers then wondered what would happen if the lasers had different orbital angular momentum and if they were slightly out of sync. This resulted in a beam that looked like a corkscrew with a gradually changing twist. And when the beam struck a flat surface, it looked like a crescent moon. The researchers noted that looked at another way, a single photon at the front of the beam was orbiting around its center more slowly than a photon at the back of the beam. The researchers promptly dubbed the new property self-torque -- and not only is it a newly discovered property of light, it is also one that has never even been predicted. Their technique may be used to modulate the orbital angular momentum of light in ways very similar to modulating frequencies in communications equipment, leading to the development of novel devices that make use of manipulating extremely tiny materials.

Something new for diabetes patients to worry about: Someone nearby could potentially connect wirelessly to your Medtronic MiniMed insulin pump, the FDA warned yesterday. From a report: While the agency said that, as far as it knows, no one has actually hacked into someone else's insulin pump and harmed them, this is the future of health care cyber risk. They could then change the pump's settings, causing it to deliver too much or too little insulin to the patient. The agency said that patients using certain models of the pump should switch to less vulnerable ones.

A reader shares a report: Germany recorded its highest-ever June temperature on Wednesday, as much of continental Europe contends with a major heat wave. The German Weather Service said the mercury hit 38.6 degrees Celsius (101.5 Fahrenheit) at 2:50 p.m. local time in Coschen, on the country's border with Poland. The previous record stood at 38.5 Celsius (101.3 Fahrenheit), which was measured in 1947 in Buhlertal, which lies close to France. The longevity of the previous record -- 72 years -- shows just how unusual and intense the current heat wave is in Europe. Any sign of quick relief is not on cards either.

Climate scientists have warned that heat waves such as this one are becoming more frequent and increasingly severe because of the climate crisis. Meteo-France, the French national weather authority, said the frequency of such events is expected to double by 2050. Temperatures exceeding 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) are forecast in a number of major cities across the continent, with meteorologists warning that higher humidity could make it feel even hotter. Further reading: Temperatures in France cross 45C threshold for first time ever.

NASA announced Thursday that it is sending a drone-style quadcopter to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Dragonfly, as the mission is called, will be capable of soaring across the skies of Titan and landing intermittently to take scientific measurements, studying the world's mysterious atmosphere and topography while searching for hints of life (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) on the only world other than Earth in our solar system with standing liquid on its surface. The New York Times reports: The mission will be developed and led from the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Md. The spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2026. Once at Titan in 2034, Dragonfly will have a life span of at least two-and-a-half years, with a battery that will be recharged with a radioactive power source between flights. Cameras on Dragonfly will stream images during flight, offering people on Earth a bird's-eye view of the Saturn moon. In addition to a camera, Dragonfly will carry an assortment of scientific instruments: spectrometers to study Titan's composition; a suite of meteorology sensors; and even a seismometer to detect titanquakes when it lands on the ground. Drills in the landing skids will collect samples of the Titan surface for onboard analysis.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: The contrails left by airplanes last only hours. But they are now so widespread that their warming effect is greater than that of all the carbon dioxide emitted by airplanes that has accumulated in the atmosphere since the first flight of the Wright brothers. Worse still, this non-CO2 warming effect is set to triple by 2050, according to a study by Ulrike Burkhardt and colleagues at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Germany. Altogether, flying is responsible for around 5 percent of global warming, the team say, so this figure will soar even higher -- and no meaningful actions are being taken to prevent this.

The researchers used a computer model of the atmosphere to estimate how much warming contrails caused in 2006 -- the latest year for which a detailed air traffic inventory is available -- and how much they will cause by 2050, when air traffic is expected to be four times higher. The model takes account of not only of the change in air traffic volume, but also the location and altitude of flights, along with the changing climate. The team conclude that the warming effect of contrails will rise from 50 milliwatts per square meter of the earth's surface in 2006 to 160 mW/m^2 by 2050. In comparison, the warming due to CO2 from aviation will rise from 24 mW/m^2 to 84 mW/m^2 by 2050. If the airline industry improves fuel efficiency and reduces the number of soot particles by improving fuels and engines, the researchers say the warming from contrails by 2050 will be limited to 140 mW/m^2 and the warming from CO2 to 60 mW/m^2.

The study has been published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.