"Scientists have managed to turn CO2 from a gas back into solid 'coal'," reports The Independent, "in a breakthrough which could potentially help remove the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere." Long-time Slashdot reader bbsguru shared their report: The research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, developed a new technique using a liquid metal electrolysis method which efficiently converts CO2 from a gas into solid particles of carbon. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the authors say their technology offers an alternative pathway for "safely and permanently" removing CO2 from the atmosphere....

RMIT researcher Dr Torben Daeneke said: "While we can't literally turn back time, turning carbon dioxide back into coal and burying it back in the ground is a bit like rewinding the emissions clock...." Lead author, Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh said the carbon produced by the technique could also be used as an electrode.

"A side benefit of the process is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so it could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles," she said. "The process also produces synthetic fuel as a by-product, which could also have industrial applications."
More coverage from Fast Company, Science magazine, and the CBC.

"Amazon has apparently started removing anti-vaccine documentaries from its Amazon Prime Video streaming service," reports CNN: The move came days after a CNN Business report highlighted the anti-vaccine content available on the site, and hours after Rep. Adam Schiff wrote an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, saying he is concerned "that Amazon is surfacing and recommending" anti-vaccination books and movies....

Amazon did not respond to questions about why the films are no longer available on Prime Video.

However, while some anti-vaccine videos are gone from the Prime streaming service, a number of anti-vaccine books were still available for purchase on Amazon.com when CNN Business reviewed search results on Friday afternoon, and some were still being offered for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers... Amazon also had not removed some anti-vaccine books that CNN Business had previously reported on, which users searching the site could mistake for offering neutral information accepted by the public health community.

Joe_NoOne (Slashdot reader #48,818) shares this update from Nature: The DNA of life on Earth naturally stores its information in just four key chemicals -- guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, commonly referred to as G, C, A and T, respectively. Now scientists have doubled this number of life's building blocks, creating for the first time a synthetic, eight-letter genetic language that seems to store and transcribe information just like natural DNA.

In a study published on 22 February in Science, a consortium of researchers led by Steven Benner, founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida, suggests that an expanded genetic alphabet could, in theory, also support life. "It's a real landmark," says Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. The study implies that there is nothing particularly "magic" or special about those four chemicals that evolved on Earth, says Romesberg. "That's a conceptual breakthrough," he adds... Benner says that the work shows that life could potentially be supported by DNA bases with different structures from the four that we know, which could be relevant in the search for signatures of life elsewhere in the Universe...

The researchers call the resulting eight-letter language 'hachimoji' after the Japanese words for 'eight' and 'letter'. The additional bases are each similar in shape to one of the natural four, but have variations in their bonding patterns. The researchers then conducted a series of experiments that showed that their synthetic sequences shares properties with natural DNA that are essential for supporting life... Benner's group previously showed that strands of DNA that included Z and P were better at binding to cancer cells than sequences with just the standard four bases. And Benner has set up a company which commercialises synthetic DNA for use in medical diagnostics.

"SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, its first spacecraft designed to carry humans, took flight for the first time Saturday," reports CNN.

Slashdot reader Applehu Akbar calls it "a perfect launch," noting the test flight is hauling a sensor-loaded dummy named "Ripley" -- plus a 400-pound cargo of essentials for the International Space Station. Crew Dragon will dock on Sunday, CNN reports, then return to earth five days later. "SpaceX's capsule is now en route to the International Space Station, which flies about 254 miles above Earth at tremendous speeds: about 10 times faster than a bullet."
The successful launch puts SpaceX one step closer to a historic landmark: Crew Dragon could be the first commercially built spacecraft to carry NASA astronauts to orbit. And Crew Dragon -- along with a capsule called Starliner built by Boeing -- could end the United States' decade-long reliance on Russia for human spaceflight...

This marks the first and only demo mission that Crew Dragon will fly without humans on board. If all goes well, the capsule design will undergo a few more reviews and safety checks, and it could be ready to fly two NASA astronauts to the space station in July, based on the space agency's current timeline.
Space.com reports that the reusable rocket also landed safely back on earth about 10 minutes after the liftoff, "acing a touchdown on the SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed off the Florida coast."

the_newsbeagle writes: In newborn intensive care units (NICUs) today, tiny fragile babies lie in incubators, wired to a variety of monitors that track their vital signs. This mess of wires makes it complicated for nurses to pick up the babies for routine tasks like diaper changes, and makes it hard for new parents to pick up their infants for cuddling. Skin-to-skin contact between parents and infants has been proven not only to help with bonding, but also to have a host of medical benefits for the infants, so the wires that tether babies to their beds are a real problem. At Northwestern University, an electrical engineer who works on flexible, stretchable electronics teamed up with a pediatric dermatologist to invent a solution. They devised a system of stick-on wireless biosensors (with a gentle adhesive that's safe even for thin preemie skin) that actually provide more information than today's standard setup. The system "is composed of two sensors, one that sticks to the chest to record electrocardiograms (providing heart rate), another that sticks to the foot to record photoplethysmograms (measuring blood oxygenation) and skin temperature," reports IEEE Spectrum. "The foot sensor required the engineering team to create software that could compensate for movement artifacts in the data. Time-syncing these two sensors also provides a continuous measurement of blood pressure; the system knows when the heart pumps out a pulse of blood and when it arrives at the foot, and that time measurement correlates well with blood pressure."

"The sensors use near-field communication (NFC) to connect to a module that can be attached to the baby's bed, and which both receives the data and sends wireless power to the sensors," the report adds. "That module transmits the data via bluetooth to a mobile phone or tablet."

The Economist tells the story of how French chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier came to publish the first putatively comprehensive list of chemical elements -- substances incapable of being broken down by chemical reactions into other substances -- known today as the periodic table. It was Lavoisier and his wife Marie-Anne who pioneered the technique of measuring quantitatively what went into and came out of a chemical reaction, as a way of getting to the heart of what such a reaction really is. "Where the story of the periodic table of the elements really starts is debatable," reports The Economist, "but Lavoisier's laboratory is as good a place as any to begin..." Here's an excerpt from the report: Lavoisier's list of elements, published in 1789, five years before his execution, had 33 entries. Of those, 23 -- a fifth of the total now recognized -- have stood the test of time. Some, like gold, iron and sulphur, had been known since ancient days. Others, like manganese, molybdenum and tungsten, were recent discoveries. What the list did not have was a structure. It was, avant la lettre, a stamp collection. But the album was missing.

Creating that album, filling it and understanding why it is the way it is took a century and a half. It is now, though, a familiar feature of every high-school science laboratory. Its rows and columns of rectangles, each containing a one- or two-letter abbreviation of the name of an element, together with its sequential atomic number, represent an order and underlying structure to the universe that would have astonished Lavoisier. It is little exaggeration to say that almost everything in modern science is connected, usually at only one or two removes, to the periodic table.

Microsoft has built a "Clinical Trials Bot" that does just as the name implies: suggests links to trials that best match the patients' needs. The bot "lets patients and doctors search for studies related to a disease and then answer a succession of text questions," reports Bloomberg. "Drugmakers can also use it to find test subjects." From the report: Microsoft won't release the bot as its own product. Instead, the software giant is talking to pharmaceutical companies that it hopes will use the bot to find trial participants, while pitching it to other partners that could turn the technology into a tool for patients, said Hadas Bitran, group manager of Microsoft Healthcare Israel. Bitran declined to name possible partners because no deals have been agreed yet. The project is part of a larger Microsoft health-care bot initiative that's helped partners build automatic chat programs for things like triaging patients and answering questions about insurance benefits. The clinical trials bot was accepted as part of the U.S. White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program and Bitran showed it on Thursday at a closed door event at the White House. She will demonstrate the tech publicly on Friday during a session at the U.S. Census Bureau.

The technology uses a form of artificial intelligence called machine reading to ingest the selection criteria for each clinical trial. It uses this data to decide which questions to ask patients and how to match their answers to suitable trials. Here's how it works for patients: They type in a search, such as "trials for a 52-year old California female with breast cancer." The bot responds with questions such as whether the patient had chemotherapy for metastatic disease -- a cancer that has spread -- and how far the patient can travel. It offers five choices that describe the patient's current health and ability to be active and care for herself. As the patient selects from the multiple-choice answers, the software generates the next question and refines the list of available trials.

The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced this week that it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher. From a report: Talks to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide. The stand by UC, which followed eight months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open access movement, in the United States and beyond. The 10-campus system accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output and is among the first American institutions, and by far the largest, to boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at American universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial publishers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceDaily: Humans and other mammals are limited to seeing a range of wavelengths of light called visible light, which includes the wavelengths of the rainbow. But infrared radiation, which has a longer wavelength, is all around us. People, animals and objects emit infrared light as they give off heat, and objects can also reflect infrared light. A multidisciplinary group of scientists led by Xue and Jin Bao at the University of Science and Technology of China as well as Gang Han at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, developed the nanotechnology to work with the eye's existing structures.

In this study, the scientists made nanoparticles that can anchor tightly to photoreceptor cells and act as tiny infrared light transducers. When infrared light hits the retina, the nanoparticles capture the longer infrared wavelengths and emit shorter wavelengths within the visible light range. The nearby rod or cone then absorbs the shorter wavelength and sends a normal signal to the brain, as if visible light had hit the retina. "In our experiment, nanoparticles absorbed infrared light around 980 nm in wavelength and converted it into light peaked at 535 nm, which made the infrared light appear as the color green," said one of the researchers. The researchers tested the nanoparticles in mice, which, like humans, cannot see infrared naturally. Mice that received the injections showed unconscious physical signs that they were detecting infrared light, such as their pupils constricting, while mice injected with only the buffer solution didn't respond to infrared light. The study was published in the journal Cell.

dryriver writes: BBC Future reports on a geoengineering technique called "marine cloud brightening" that makes marine Stratocumulus clouds -- which currently reflect almost 30% of total Solar radiation back into space -- whiter, causing them to reflect more sunlight away from earth. Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University, a well-known 1970s wave and tidal power pioneer, has designed an unmanned hydro-foil ship, computer-controlled and wind-powered, which pumps an ultra-fine mist of sea salt toward the cloud layer, causing it to turn white: "'Spraying about 10 cubic meters per second could undo all the [global warming] damage we've done to the world up until now,' Salter claims. And, he says, the annual cost would be less than the cost to host the annual UN Climate Conference -- between $100-$200 million each year. Salter calculates that a fleet of 300 of his autonomous ships could reduce global temperatures by 1.5C. He also believes that smaller fleets could be deployed to counter-act regional extreme weather events.

Hurricane seasons and El Nino, exacerbated by high sea temperatures, could be tamed by targeted cooling via marine cloud brightening. Salter boasts that 160 of his ships could 'moderate an El Nino event, and a few hundred [would] stop hurricanes.' The same could be done, he says, to protect large coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef, and even cool the polar regions to allow sea ice to return. So, what's the catch? Well, there's a very big catch indeed. The potential side-effects of solar geoengineering on the scale needed to slow hurricanes or cool global temperatures are not well understood. According to various theories, it could prompt droughts, flooding, and catastrophic crop failures. Another major concern is that geoengineering could be used as an excuse to slow down emissions reduction, meaning CO2 levels continue to rise and oceans continue to acidify -- which, of course, brings its own serious problems."

The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Andrew Wheeler as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, ratifying President Trump's choice of a former advocate for business interests to lead the agency. From a report: Wheeler, also a former Republican Senate aide on environmental issues, has been acting administrator since July, when former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned amid a host of ethics controversies. Since Wheeler began leading the agency, he has continued work on many of the same priorities as his predecessor, including looking to roll back Obama-era air and water pollution regulations. But Wheeler has brought a level of stability to the agency that didn't exist under Pruitt, keeping a relatively low profile while continuing to make progress towards meeting the Trump administration's policy goals for the agency. He has met often with industry representatives. Wheeler attended or held more than 50 meetings with representatives of companies or industry groups regulated by the EPA between April and August of 2018, a CNN review of his internal schedules found.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Chemists have stumbled across a new way to separate reflected light into the colors of the rainbow -- a phenomenon known as iridescence. The surprisingly simple technique, which is something of a hybrid of previously known ones, could have applications both scientific and aesthetic. In iridescence, an object reflects different colors at different angles, separating white light into its constituent colors.

Now, [researchers] at Pennsylvania State University in State College report producing iridescence in a new way. They happened across the effect in early 2017, when they cooked up micron-size spherical droplets containing two types of oil in which the lighter oil formed a lentil-shaped upper layer the researchers hoped to use as a lens. But surprisingly, when illuminated from above, the edges of the lentils glowed with a color that depended on their size and the angle at which they were viewed, the team reports today in Nature. Clarity came only with the computer simulations performed [the researchers]. Their analysis showed the iridescence emerges through a new mechanism that blends certain elements of the previously known ones. [...] Engineers already use thin-films and refractive particles to create iridescence in video displays, paints, and decorative wall coverings. With its simplicity and adjustability, the new effect could open ways to color the world. The effect can be explained in a much simpler system: "water droplets that condense and hang from the underside of the lid of a petri dish. Light waves entering near one edge of a droplet can bounce two or more times off the dome of the droplet before emerging near the other edge -- much as light reflects off the back of a raindrop in a rainbow. However, the light waves entering at slightly different distances from the center of the droplet can bounce different numbers of times. And waves bouncing different numbers of times can interfere and reinforce each other, as in diffraction or thin-film interference. As a result, different colors emerge at different angles, which can be controlled by changing the size of the droplet."

Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CNN: A team of 12 geologists and archaeologists from across the United Kingdom unveiled research this month that traces some of the prehistoric monument's smaller stones to two quarries in western Wales. The team also found evidence of prehistoric tools, stone wedges and digging activity in those quarries, tracing them to around 3000 BC, the era when Stonehenge's first stage was constructed. It's rock-solid evidence that humans were involved in moving these "bluestones" to where they sit today, a full 150 miles away, the researchers say. "It finally puts to rest long-standing arguments over whether the bluestones were moved by human agency or by glacial action," University of Southampton Archeology Professor Joshua Pollard said in an email. Slashdot reader schwit1 adds: "This leaves the question of how..."

Renewable energy use and reduced energy use overall have helped carbon emissions remain flat or below average as the global economy continued to grow over the years. But, as new research has found, government policy also appears to play a large role. Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: The researchers started by identifying countries that show a "peak and decline" pattern of carbon emissions since the 1990s. They came up with 18, all but one of them in Europe -- the exception is the United States. For comparison, they created two different control groups of 30 countries, neither of which has seen emissions decline. One group saw high GDP growth, while the second saw moderate economic growth; in the past, these would have been associated with corresponding changes in emissions. Within each country, the researchers looked into whether there were government energy policies that could influence the trajectory of emissions. They also examined four items that could drive changes in emissions: total energy use, share of energy provided by fossil fuels, the carbon intensity of the overall energy mix, and efficiency (as measured by energy losses during use). On average, emissions in the decline group dropped by 2.4 percent over the decade between 2005 and 2015.

Half of this drop came from lowering the percentage of fossil fuels used, with renewables making a large contribution; another 35 percent came from a drop in energy use. But the most significant factor varied from country to country. Austria, Finland, and Sweden saw a drop in the share of fossil fuels within their energy mix. In contrast, a drop in total energy use was the biggest factor for France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The U.S. was an odd one out, with all four possible factors playing significant roles in causing emissions to drop. For the two control groups, however, there was a single dominant factor: total energy use counted for 75 and 80 percent of the change in the low- and high-economic growth groups, respectively. But there was considerably more variability in the low-economic growth group. All of the high-growth group saw increased energy use contribute 60 percent of the growth in emissions or more. In contrast, some of the low-growth group actually saw their energy use drop. So why are some countries so successful at dropping their emissions? Part of it is likely to be economic growth, but the biggest reason may have to do with government policies. "By 2015, the countries in the group that saw declining emissions had an average of 35 policies that promoted renewable energy and another 23 that promoted energy efficiency," reports Ars Technica. "Both of those numbers are significantly higher than the averages for the control groups. And there's evidence that these policies are effective. The number of pro-efficiency policies correlated with the drop in energy use, while the number of renewable policies correlated with the drop in the share of fossil fuels."

A pair of Hewlett Packard Enterprise servers sent up to the International Space Station in August 2017 as an experiment have still not come back to Earth, three months after their intended return. From a report: Together they make up the Spaceborne Computer, a Linux system that has supercomputer processing power. They were sent up to see how durable they would be in space with minimal specialist treatment. After 530 days, they are still working. Their return flight was postponed after a Russian rocket failed in October 2018. HPE senior content architect Adrian Kasbergen said they may return in June 2019 if there is space on a flight but "right now they haven't got a ticket." The company is working with Nasa to be "computer-ready" for the first manned Mars flight, estimated to take place in about 2030. The company is also working with Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Prominent astronomer Dr Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington D.C., has discovered a new object in the distant reaches of our solar system and given it the name FarFarOut. "At 140 times further away from the sun than our own planet is, the newly identified body -- if its discovery is confirmed -- will become the furthest known object in our solar system," reports The Guardian. Sheppard's discovery was made after his team was analyzing astronomical data to track down Planet Nine, a yet-to-be-discovered body thought to have 10 times the mass of Earth. From the report: Sheppard said he made the discovery of FarFarOut when a lecture he was due to give on his team's work was postponed and he went back to analyzing his data. He said FarFarOut was somewhat mysterious. "It is very faint; it is on the edge of our ability to detect it," Sheppard said. "We don't know anything about the orbit of this object, we just know it is far, far out." Sheppard said further observations were in the offing to shed more light on the find. The current record holder -- a dwarf planet at 120 times the Earth-sun distance -- was named merely FarOut when it was spotted by the same team in December last year.

According to a new report from The Verge, Facebook moderators in Phoenix, Arizona reportedly make just $28,800 a year and use sex and drugs to deal with the stress. "The report published on Monday detailed the experiences of current and former employees who worked at professional services company Cognizant, a company they say Facebook outsources its moderating efforts to," Gizmodo summarizes. "According to the report, employees experienced severe mental health distress, which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed. Some even began believing the conspiracy theories they were tasked with reviewing. One quality assurance manager said he began bringing a gun to work in response to threats from fired workers." From the report: "There was nothing that they were doing for us," one former moderator told The Verge, "other than expecting us to be able to identify when we're broken. Most of the people there that are deteriorating -- they don't even see it. And that's what kills me." "Randy," a quality assurance worker at Cognizant charged with reviewing posts flagged by moderators, said that several times over his year at the company he was approached and intimidated by moderators to change his decisions. "They would confront me in the parking lot and tell me they were going to beat the shit out of me," Randy told The Verge. He also said that fired Cognizant employees made what he believed to be genuine threats of harm to their former colleagues. Randy started to bring a concealed gun to the office to protect himself.

Employees told The Verge that moderators in the Phoenix office dealt with the hellish reality of their jobs by having sex in the office -- in stairwells, bathrooms, parking garages, and a lactation room -- smoking weed on breaks, and joking about suicide. A former moderator claimed that there was a joke among colleagues that "time to go hang out on the roof" was subtext for wanting to jump off the building. Moderators for Facebook have to review graphic posts containing violence, dehumanizing speech, and child abuse, but they also have to weed through the conspiracy theories that run rampant on the web. It's well-reported that the former has resulted in moderators developing PTSD and other debilitating mental health issues, but Monday's report from The Verge indicates that the latter may be causing them to develop fringe beliefs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: You may not give a second thought to the tunes spinning on a constant loop at your favorite cafe or coffee shop, but one writer and podcaster who had to listen to repetitive music for years while working in bars and restaurants argues it's a serious workers' rights issue. "[It's] the same system that's used to [...] flood people out of, you know, the Branch Davidian in Waco or was used on terror suspects in Guantanamo -- they use the repetition of music," Adam Johnson told The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti. "I'm not suggesting that working at Applebee's is the same as being at Guantanamo, but the principle's the same."

Earlier this year, irritated Starbucks employees took to Reddit to rage about how they had to listen to the same songs from the Broadway hit musical Hamilton on repeat while on the job. One user wrote that if they heard a Hamilton song one more time, "I'm getting a ladder and ripping out all of our speakers from the ceiling." As a solution, he suggested health inspectors could enforce better working conditions, or a tip line could be created for people to report poor working conditions, like repetitive music. Another solution? Communication, says neuroscientist Jessica Grahn. She studies music, which science has shown to be one of the strongest influencers of mood, she said. It can calm dementia patients struggling with depression or anger, or increase our endurance when we're working out. However, there are downsides to the power of music. Unlike how we can close our eyes to things we don't want to see, we can't close our ears to sound. Having control over one's environment can make a big difference, said Grahn, which is why she recommends employers and employees talk about why certain music is being played, or what they can do to switch things up.

Last week, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried an Israeli-made spacecraft named Beresheet beyond the grasp of Earth's gravity and sent it on its way to the surface of the moon. On board Beresheet is a specially designed disc encoded with a 30-million-page archive of human civilization built to last billions of years into the future. From a report: The backup for humanity has been dubbed "The Lunar Library" by its creator, the Arch Mission Foundation (AMF). "The idea is to place enough backups in enough places around the solar system, on an ongoing basis, that our precious knowledge and biological heritage can never be lost," the nonprofit's co-founder Nova Spivack told CNET via email.

The disc aboard Beresheet is about the size and thickness of a DVD, but consists of 25 stacked thin nickel films that AMF insists can resist radiation, extreme temperatures and other harsh conditions found in space for billions of years. There is, of course, no way to test how long it will last, but if it survives as long as hoped, the disc may even be around longer than the moon itself. The top four layers are actually filled with 60,000 pages of tiny analog images that can be viewed with optical microscope technology that's been around for centuries. The images include a sort of users' guide explaining human language, the contents of the disc and how to access the deeper layers containing compressed digital data.

Leading US paleontologists are calling for a worldwide halt to the sale of vertebrate dinosaur fossils. The booming market for specimens, driven by their popularity with wealthy private collectors, including Hollywood stars, is pushing up prices and putting them out of reach of museums and scientists, they say. From a report: While the art market is organized around brand-name artists, dinosaur sales are all about celebrity species, with a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton fetching up to $10m, although the velociraptor is the most prized. The price tag for a triceratops's skull is $170,000 to $400,000, and a diplodocus is $570,000 to $1.1m. Last year a complete egg of an aepyornis maximus, otherwise known as an elephant bird, sold for $130,000 -- roughly five times what it would have gone for a decade earlier.

Last year the US Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology (SVP) called on the Parisian auction house Aguttes to cancel a sale inside the Eiffel tower that contained just one lot: a 29-foot-long dinosaur of a yet-to-be identified species. The winning bidder paid $2.3m for the piece. Executive members of the society drew attention to the claim that the winning bidder could name the species, calling that assertion "misleading because the naming of new species is governed by the rules of the International Code of Nomenclature." "The sale of all fossils is inappropriate," says Catherine Badgley, former president of the SVP, which represents more than 2,200 international palaeontologists. "Many, particularly vertebrate fossils, are rarely common, and it's certainly not the case for dinosaurs. The commodification is in principle inappropriate because it motivates unscrupulous people."