Many doctors now are likely to wear everyday clothes, or blue or green "scrubs", which are said to reduce eye strain in brightly-lit operating theatres. White coats are reckoned to be capable of spreading diseases as easily as clothing of any other colour, especially when long sleeves brush against multiple surfaces. Many clinics and hospitals now have a "bare below the elbows" policy for staff, whether in uniform or their own clothes. This is also supposed to encourage more thorough handwashing. What, though, if the clothes worn by medical staff could actively help prevent bugs being passed around? From a report: Some metals, such as gold and silver, have natural antibacterial properties and are used to coat certain solid items, such as medical implants. But putting metallic coatings onto stretchy and foldable fabrics is tricky, and those coatings can quickly be swept away in a washing machine. What is needed, reckons Liu Xuqing of the University of Manchester, in England, is a way to make antibacterial coatings for fabrics that, quite literally, hold tight.

Instead of gold or silver, Dr Liu's metal of choice is copper. This exhibits the same bug-killing properties but has the benefit of being an awful lot cheaper than those two precious metals, making a commercial coating process easier to devise. Working with colleagues from two Chinese institutions, Northwest Minzu University in Lanzhou and Southwest University in Chongqing, Dr Liu has been treating samples of fabric with a chemical process that grafts what is called a "polymer brush" onto their surfaces. As the name suggests, when viewed at a resolution of a few nanometres (billionths of a metre) through an electron microscope, the polymer strands look like tiny protruding bristles. That done they use a second chemical procedure to coat the bristles with a catalyst.

After this, they immerse the fabric in a copper-containing solution from which the catalyst causes the metal to precipitate and form tiny particles that anchor themselves to the polymer brush. Indeed, they bond so tightly that Dr Liu compares the resulting coating to reinforced concrete. Yet the process takes place at such a minute scale on the surface of the fabric that it should not affect the feel or quality of the finished material.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new study led by the University of California, Santa Cruz's Greg Rau highlights another tool for our CO2 removal toolbox: splitting seawater to produce hydrogen gas for fuel while capturing CO2 with ocean chemistry. In electrolysis, a device powered by electricity is used to split H2O, producing hydrogen gas. Several chemical modifications to this process have been proposed that can also grab CO2 from the atmosphere. Like the idea of using biofuels, this represents a "win-win" by producing an energy resource while capturing CO2, bringing the cost down. [T]he gist is that atmospheric CO2 goes into the ocean as bicarbonate -- which won't acidify the water or harm ecosystems. So if you power the electrolysis process with renewable energy, you can turn solar/wind/hydroelectric energy into hydrogen fuel while also removing CO2 from the air.

The new study focuses on a basic estimate of the cost and maximum potential of this technique. First, the researchers worked out its efficiency of CO2 capture -- about 0.3 tons captured per gigajoule of electricity input, including the losses from quarrying and crushing rock. That's around 10 times greater than biofuel schemes, but it depends on the assumption that there is demand for all the hydrogen fuel you make. The hydrogen can be used by vehicles, and there's the possibility of using hydrogen as a type of storage for the electric grid -- using excess power to make hydrogen that can run a power plant when needed. So it's not too farfetched that demand could rise to meet supply. The researchers' back-of-the-envelope estimate puts the cost of this system at between $3 and $161 per ton of captured CO2, depending on which type of renewable energy powers it. The study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A week after appointing a CEO for its healthcare joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan, Amazon today announced an acquisition that underscores how it also hopes to have a more direct -- and more commercial -- role in the world of healthcare in the coming years. The company has purchased PillPack, an online pharmacy the lets users buy medications in pre-made doses. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed by Amazon, but sources close to the deal say it was for just under $1 billion.

PillPack has a license to operate in all 50 states in the U.S. and has other accreditations such as URAC AND VIPPS, but it doesn't seem to be operational in international markets. Its PharmacyOS -- the system it has built that forms the basis of the company -- is a platform that helps manage patient data and figure out how to balance meds together in safe doses for its customers.

United Therapeutics, a startup that sells drugs to treat lung ailments, plans to use a 3-D printer to manufacture human lungs in "unlimited quantities." Bioprinting isn't a new idea. 3-D printers can make human skin, even retinas. Yet the method has been limited to tissues that are very small or very thin and lack blood vessels. From a report: United instead is developing a printer that it believes will be able, within a few years, to manufacture a solid, rubbery outline of a lung in exquisite detail, including all 23 descending branches of the airway, the gas-exchanging alveoli, and a delicate network of capillaries. A lung made from collagen won't help anyone: it's to a real lung what a rubber chicken is to an actual hen. So United is also developing ways to impregnate the matrix with human cells so they'll attach and burrow into it, bringing it alive.

[...] United has already made some risky organ bets. One of its subsidiaries, Revivicor, supplies surgeons with hearts, kidneys, and lungs from genetically engineered pigs (these have been used in baboons, so far). Another, Lung Bioengineering, refurbishes lungs from human donors by pumping warm solution into them. About 250 people have already received lungs that would otherwise have been designated medical waste. Don't expect fully manufactured organs soon. United, in its company projections, predicts it won't happen for another 12 years. United CEO Martine Rothblatt acknowledges that the printed structure I saw is just a start. "It's only two branches and no cells," she says.

Writing in the journal Nano Letters, scientists from Turkey, the U.S. and U.K. describe a material that acts as thermal camouflage. Cosmos reports: Coskun Kocabas and colleagues created a film comprising multiple ultra-thin layers of graphene and a bottom layer of gold, with non-volatile ionic liquid in between them. When a small current is applied, the ions move up into the graphene layer, cutting down the infrared radiation the surface would normally emit. Because it's thin, light and flexible the film can be applied to any number of surfaces, including clothing. Tests have successfully camouflaged a hand owned by a subject wearing a covering of the material, and others have shown it to be indistinguishable from its surroundings in a variety of ambient temperatures.

Astronomers have found that blasts of ocean spray erupting from the Saturn moon of Enceladus contain complex organic molecules, "making it the only place beyond Earth known to harbor crucial constituents for life as we know it," reports The Guardian. From the report: Astronomers detected the compounds in plumes of water and ice that shoot from huge fractures in the south pole of Enceladus, a 300-mile-wide ice ball that orbits Saturn along with 52 other moons. Enceladus stands out among the planet's natural satellites because it hosts a global water ocean beneath its frozen crust. German and U.S. scientists found tell-tale signs of organic molecules far more complex than amino acids and 10 times heavier than methane in data gathered by Nasa's Cassini probe as it flew over the fractures on Enceladus. Known as "tiger stripes," the fissures reach several miles down into the ice and are largely filled with ocean water that percolates up from the ocean.

Writing in the journal Nature, Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist who worked on the data at Heidelberg University, and his colleagues describe their analysis of fresh Cassini data that shows that most ice particles blasting out of Enceladus are almost pure water. But a small proportion, about 1%, are rich in organic molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and potentially nitrogen too. Some were made up of hundreds of atoms. "Our results mark the first ever detection of complex organics coming from an extraterrestrial water world," said Postberg.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: University of Georgia engineering professor Jenna Jambeck said that indeed, part of the reason China is now refusing to process American and European plastic is that so many people tossed waste into the wrong bin, resulting in a contaminated mix difficult or impossible to recycle. In a paper published last week in Science Advances, she and her colleagues calculated that between now and 2030, 111 million metric tons of potentially recyclable plastic will be diverted from Chinese plants into landfills.

Jambeck said that China used to turn a profit by importing the stuff from American and European recycling bins and turning it into useful material. But as other countries attempted to simplify things for consumers with "single stream" recycling -- think of one big blue bin for paper, plastic, metal and glass -- the material reaching China became too contaminated with nonrecyclable items. The instructions to put everything in one bin seemed appealing but made it much easier to do recycling wrong.

In a blow to NASA's prestige and its budget, America's next great space telescope has been postponed again. From a report: NASA announced on Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope, once scheduled to be launched into orbit around the sun this fall, will take three more years and another billion dollars to complete. A report delivered to NASA by an independent review board estimated that the cost of the troubled Webb telescope would now be $9.66 billion, and that it would not be ready to launch until March 30, 2021.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It looks cold, dark and empty, but astronomers have revealed that interstellar space is permeated with a fine mist of grease-like molecules. The study provides the most precise estimate yet of the amount of "space grease" in the Milky Way, by recreating the carbon-based compounds in the laboratory. The Australian-Turkish team discovered more than expected: 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of gloop, or enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter. Prof Tim Schmidt, a chemist at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and co-author of the study, said that the windscreen of a future spaceship travelling through interstellar space might be expected to get a sticky coating. "Amongst other stuff it'll run into is interstellar dust, which is partly grease, partly soot and partly silicates like sand," he said, adding that the grease is swept away within our own solar system by the solar wind. The findings bring scientists closer to figuring out the total amount of carbon in interstellar space, which fuels the formation of stars, planets and is essential for life.

A Japanese spacecraft has arrived at its target - an asteroid shaped like a diamond or, according to some, a spinning top. From a report: Hayabusa 2 has been travelling toward the space rock Ryugu since launching from the Tanegashima spaceport in 2014. It is on a quest to study the object close-up and deliver rocks and soil from Ryugu to Earth. It will use explosives to propel a projectile into Ryugu, digging out a fresh sample from beneath the surface. Dr Makoto Yoshikawa, Hayabusa 2's mission manager, talked about the plan now that the spacecraft had arrived at its destination. "At first, we will study very carefully the surface features. Then we will select where to touch down. Touchdown means we get the surface material," he told me. A copper projectile, or "impactor" will separate from the spacecraft, floating down to the surface of the asteroid. Once Hayabusa 2 is safely out of the way, an explosive charge will detonate, driving the projectile into the surface.

A new study by Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute determined that it's quite likely humans are alone in the observable universe. Fortune reports: The study looked at the Fermi paradox -- the apparent discrepancy between the seeming likelihood of alien life, given the billions of stars similar to our sun, and the scant evidence that such life actually exists. The paradox was named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked his colleagues at Los Alamos, N.M.. "Where Is Everyone?"

The study authors then examined various hypotheses and equations used to resolve the Fermi paradox. The results weren't pretty: "Our main result is to show that proper treatment of scientific uncertainties dissolves the Fermi paradox by showing that it is not at all unlikely ex ante for us to be alone in the Milky Way, or in the observable universe. Our second result is to show that, taking account of observational bounds on the prevalence of other civilizations, our updated probabilities suggest that there is a substantial probability that we are alone." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk cited the study's conclusions as an "added impetus" for humanity to become a spacefaring civilization capable of extending life beyond Earth. He tweeted: "This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets..."

In the last decade, we have discovered thousands of planets outside our solar system and have learned that rocky, temperate worlds are numerous in our galaxy. The next step will involve asking even bigger questions. Could some of these planets host life? And if so, asks NASA, will we be able to recognize life elsewhere if we see it? From a blog post on NASA's website: A group of leading researchers in astronomy, biology and geology has come together under NASA's Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or NExSS, to take stock of our knowledge in the search for life on distant planets and to lay the groundwork for moving the related sciences forward.

"We're moving from theorizing about life elsewhere in our galaxy to a robust science that will eventually give us the answer we seek to that profound question: Are we alone?" said Martin Still, an exoplanet scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington. In a set of five review papers published last week in the scientific journal Astrobiology, NExSS scientists took an inventory of the most promising signs of life, called biosignatures. The paper authors include four scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. They considered how to interpret the presence of biosignatures, should we detect them on distant worlds. A primary concern is ensuring the science is strong enough to distinguish a living world from a barren planet masquerading as one.

Last January in northern Sweden, a German-led team of physicists loaded a curious machine onto an unmanned rocket. The payload, about as tall as a single-story apartment, was essentially a custom-made freezer -- a vacuum chamber, with a small chip and lasers within, that could cool single atoms near absolute zero.

It may sound like a bizarre experiment, but it is something physicists have been aching to do for years. They launched the rocket about 90 miles past the atmosphere's boundary of outer space, monitoring a livestream from a heated building nearby. Then, just 17 minutes later, they watched as the freezer plummeted back down to Earth, landing via parachute on snowy ground 40 miles from the launch site. Wired elaborates: See, the freezer that the Germans launched has the ability to make atoms clump together in a cloud-like blob called a Bose-Einstein condensate -- a phase of matter that exhibits some truly bizarre properties. It's delicate enough to respond to tiny fluctuations in gravity and electromagnetic fields, which means it could someday make for a super-precise sensor in space. But down on Earth, it tends to collapse in a matter of milliseconds because of gravity. So the blobs had to go to space. Since the late '90s, physicists have been developing machines that can autonomously assemble and control the blobs during spaceflight. With this rocket launch, they've succeeded. The group in Germany, led by physicist Ernst Rasel of University of Hannover, just released pictures of blobs they managed to create [PDF], as well as precise measurements of how they jiggled during their brief trip. "They've essentially laid the groundwork to show that you can actually do this, and it's not totally insane," says physicist Nathan Lundblad of Bates College.

The Russian-manufactured Proton rocket that has been traveling into space since before humans landed on the Moon will finally stop flying. "In an interview with a Russian publication, Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin said production of the Proton booster will cease as production shifts to the new Angara booster," reports Ars Technica. "No new Proton contracts are likely to be signed." From the report: First launched in 1965, the rocket was initially conceived of as a booster to fly two-person crews around the Moon, as the Soviet Union sought to beat NASA into deep space. Indeed, some of its earliest missions launched creatures, including two turtles, to the Moon and back. The decision will bring down the curtain on one of the longest-used and most versatile rockets in world history. As the United States developed the space shuttle in the 1970s and began flying it in the 1980s, the Russian space agency saw the opportunity to commercialize the Proton rocket, and by the end of the 1990s, the booster became a major moneymaker for the Russian space industry. With a capacity of 22.8 tons to low-Earth orbit, it became a dominant player in the commercial market for heavier satellites. An increasing rate of failures, combined with the rise of SpaceX's cheaper Falcon 9 rockets, "have caused the number of Proton launches in a given year to dwindle from eight or so to just one or two," adds Ars. "This shrinking market has opened the door to the Angara rocket, which has the advantage of not using environmentally hazardous fuel for each of its stages..."

Tick bites can cause all sorts of nasty afflictions. And if you're bitten by a Lone Star tick, here's one more to add to the list: a red meat allergy. NPR reports: About 10 years ago, Dr. Scott Commins, an allergist and associate professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was among the first physicians to identify the allergy in patients with tick bites. Back then, there were just a few dozen known cases. That has increased dramatically. "We're confident the number is over 5,000 [cases], and that's in the U.S. alone," Commins says. There are also cases in Sweden, Germany and Australia -- likely linked to other species of ticks. In the U.S., the Lone Star tick has expanded its range beyond the Southeast, and there are documented cases of alpha gal meat allergies farther north -- including New York, Maine and Minnesota. "The range of the tick is expanding," says Commins. So is awareness about the red meat allergy it can cause. "We have a blood test, and the word is getting out."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the first prescription drug derived from the marijuana plant, as a treatment for rare forms of epilepsy that primarily afflict children. From a report: The FDA said Monday that it cleared GW Pharmaceuticals's Epidiolex, also known as cannabidiol, to reduce seizures associated with forms of epilepsy known as Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome, in patients 2 years of age and older. Cannabidiol is derived from the cannabis plant, also known as marijuana. U.K.-based GW Pharmaceuticals says the solution, taken by mouth, is made from a proprietary strain of cannabis designed to maximize a therapeutic component while minimizing components that produce euphoria. GW Pharmaceuticals grows the plants in the U.K.

The FDA said Monday that the drug doesn't cause the high that comes from the chemical tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is the main psychoactive component of marijuana. FDA officials also said the drug doesn't appear to have abuse potential, citing minimal reports of euphoria in patients who took the drug in clinical studies. Further reading: StatNews, The Guardian, and FDA.

Erika Engelhaupt, National Geographic: A few years ago, a man began telling his family members a horrifying tale: There are bugs living inside him. [...] He shows the classic signs of what scientists call delusory parasitosis, or Ekbom syndrome, an unwavering but incorrect belief that the patient's body has been infested with something. For years, entomologists have insisted that these delusions aren't as rare as psychiatrists and the public may think. And now, a study by the Mayo Clinic suggests they're right. The first population-based study of the condition's prevalence suggests that about 27 out of a hundred thousand Americans a year have delusions of an infestation. That would mean around 89,000 people in the U.S. right now are plagued by the condition.

For many sufferers of such delusions, the infestation takes the form of insects or mites, usually tiny and often described as biting or crawling on the skin. Others report feeling worms or leeches or some kind of unknown parasite. Many of the afflicted turn up, eventually, in an entomologist's office. And as the entomologists tell them, only two kinds of arthropods actually infest humans: lice and a mite that causes scabies. Both are easy to identify and cause characteristic symptoms. Bedbugs or fleas might infest a house, but they don't actually live on or inside the human body; they just feed on us and leave. Likewise, there are mites that live on our skin, especially the face, but they're a normal part of everyone's body, much like the bacteria living in our guts.

A rising number of journals that claim to review submissions do not bother to do so. Not coincidentally, this seems to be leading some academics to inflate their publication lists with papers that might not pass such scrutiny. The Economist: Experts debate how many journals falsely claim to engage in peer review. Cabells, an analytics firm in Texas, has compiled a blacklist of those which it believes are guilty. According to Kathleen Berryman, who is in charge of this list, the firm employs 65 criteria to determine whether a journal should go on it -- though she is reluctant to go into details. Cabells' list now totals around 8,700 journals, up from a bit over 4,000 a year ago. Another list, which grew to around 12,000 journals, was compiled until recently by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado. Using Mr Beall's list, Bo-Christer Bjork, an information scientist at the Hanken School of Economics, in Helsinki, estimates that the number of articles published in questionable journals has ballooned from about 53,000 a year in 2010 to more than 400,000 today. He estimates that 6% of academic papers by researchers in America appear in such journals.

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: The causes of Type 1 diabetes can be significantly reversed over several years with just two injections of a common tuberculosis vaccine injected a few weeks apart, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital announced Thursday in a paper published in the journal Nature. Researchers found a substantial reduction in the blood-sugar marker HbA1c that is used to diagnose diabetes.

All subjects with diabetes who received the vaccine had a 10% reduction after three years and 18% after four years, bringing them below the cutoff point for a clinical diagnosis. Those subjects followed for a full eight years retained most of the reduction. Participants who received a placebo or were in a reference group that followed normal diabetic management saw their blood sugar measurement rise by a few percentage points during the same periods followed... A 10% reduction in Hb1Ac reduces the risk of death as a result of diabetes by 21%, and drops by 37% other complications, like blindness and loss of feeling in hands and feet, according to a 2000 study.

An anonymous reader quotes Qz: NASA is not going to be able to find all the asteroids big enough to cause serious devastation on Earth by 2020 -- or even 2033. Also: For a hypothetical attempt to send a spacecraft to divert an seriously dangerous incoming asteroid, we'll need a ten year heads-up to build it and get it to the asteroid.

The good news? They're working on it. "If a real threat does arise, we are prepared to pull together the information about what options might work and provide that information to decision-makers," Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer, told reporters.
But NASA's methodology is now being criticized by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold -- in the peer-reviewed journal Icarus. An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American: Since 2016, Nathan Myhrvold has argued that there are fatal flaws in the data from NASA's NEOWISE mission to hunt space rocks... NASA is working to develop a follow-up space telescope that would use the same scientific approach to fulfill a mandate from the US Congress to discover nearly all of the space rocks that could pose a threat to Earth.

After 18 months of peer review, and plenty of acrimony on both sides, Myhrvold's latest critique appeared on 22 May on the website of the journal Icarus. Among other things, he argues that NEOWISE estimates of asteroid diameters should not be trusted -- a crucial challenge, because the size of an asteroid determines how much damage it would cause if it hit Earth. "These observations are the best we're going to have for a very long time," says Myhrvold. "And they weren't really analysed very well at all."
NASA hasn't responded in detail to Myhrvold's criticism, though a June 14th statement said their team "stands by its data and scientific findings," noting that they'd also been published in several peer-reviewed journals.