schwit1 writes: The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized the first rapid coronavirus test that doesn't need any special computer equipment to get results. The 15-minute test from Abbott Laboratories will sell for $5, giving it a competitive edge over similar tests that need to be popped into a small machine. The self-contained test is the size of a credit card and is based on the same technology used to test for the flu, strep throat and other infections. It's the latest cheaper, simpler test to hit the U.S. market, providing new options to expand testing as schools and businesses struggle to reopen and flu season approaches. The FDA also recently greenlighted a saliva test from Yale University that bypasses some of the supplies that have led to testing bottlenecks. Both tests have limitations and neither can be done at home. Several companies are developing rapid, at-home tests, but none have yet won approval. Abbott's new test still requires a nasal swab by a health worker, like most older coronavirus tests. The Yale saliva test eliminates the need for a swab, but can only be run at high-grade laboratories. And in general, rapid tests like Abbott's are less accurate than lab-developed tests.

British researchers have identified 50 new planets using artificial intelligence, marking a technological breakthrough in astronomy. CNN reports: Astronomers and computer scientists from the University of Warwick built a machine learning algorithm to dig through old NASA data containing thousands of potential planet candidates. It's not always clear, however, which of these candidates are genuine. When scientists search for exoplanets (planets outside our solar system), they look for dips in light that indicate a planet passing between the telescope and their star. But these dips could also be caused by other factors, like background interference or even errors in the camera. But the new AI can tell the difference.

The research team trained the algorithm by having it go through data collected by NASA's now-retired Kepler Space Telescope, which spent nine years in deep space on a world-hunting mission. Once the algorithm learned to accurately separate real planets from false positives, it was used to analyze old data sets that had not yet been confirmed -- which is where it found the 50 exoplanets. These 50 exoplanets, which orbit around other stars, range in size from as large as Neptune to smaller than Earth, the university said in a news release. Some of their orbits are as long as 200 days, and some as short as a single day. And now that astronomers know the planets are real, they can prioritize them for further observation. The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Elon Musk has said that his secretive neurotech firm Neuralink will demonstrate a working "device," presumably a brain-machine interface, at 6PM ET on Friday. The Verge reports: Musk has spoken repeatedly about his belief that BMI devices are needed to help humans keep up with AI by supplementing our brainpower, but right now, his goal is much simpler: to create an implantable device that lets people control phones or computers with their mind. Musk initially announced the August 28th "progress update" back in July, and has now offered more details on what will be shown. He says the update will include the unveiling of a second-generation robot designed to attach the company's technology to the brain, and a demo of neurons "firing in real-time," though it's not clear exactly what is meant by this.

Even compared to Musk's other ventures like Tesla and SpaceX, Neuralink is ambitious. The company wants to connect to the brain using flexible electrodes thinner than a human hair that it calls "threads." Current BMI devices use stiff electrodes for this job, which can cause damage. But inserting flexible electrodes is a much more delicate and challenging task, hence the company's focus on building a "sewing machine" like robot to do the job. Eventually, Neuralink hopes to make the installation process for BMIs as non-invasive as Lasik eye surgery, even removing the need to use general anesthetic. Musk has previously spoken about the need for an automated Lasik-like process for BMIs to overcome the constraints and costs involved with needing to use highly trained neural surgeons. But this isn't ready to be shown off yet, according to Musk. "Still far from LASIK, but could get pretty close in a few years," Musk tweeted in response to a followup question about the event. Keep your eyes on the company's YouTube channel, where Neuralink will likely stream Friday's event.

In a mindboggling and dangerous move, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week quietly reversed its recommendation on COVID-19 testing for those exposed to the virus. Now, the CDC says that exposed but symptomless people do not need to be tested. From a report: The change immediately alarmed and outraged public health and infectious disease experts. It is well established that SARS-CoV-2 -- the pandemic coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19 -- can cause completely asymptomatic infections in some and spread from other infected people before they develop symptoms (so-called "pre-symptomatic transmission"). In fact, some modeling studies have suggested that pre-symptomatic transmission may account for nearly half, or even more, of SARS-CoV-2 spread.

That information previously spurred the CDC to recommend testing for anyone that was known to have -- or even suspected to have -- close contact with an infected person (that is, be within six feet for 15 or more minutes). "Testing is recommended for all close contacts of persons with SARS-CoV-2 infection," the agency said on its website as recently as August 22. "Because of the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, it is important that contacts of individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection be quickly identified and tested."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smola, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths. Previous laboratory studies have suggested that birds may not be very good at seeing obstructions while they're flying, and adding visual cues like different colored fan blades can increase birds' chances of spotting a rapidly rotating fan.

At the Smola wind farm, regular checks of four particular wind turbines -- each 70m tall with three 40m-long blades -- found six white-tailed eagle carcasses between 2006 and 2013. In total, the four turbines killed 18 birds that flew into the blades over those six years, along with five willow ptarmigans that are known to collide with the turbine towers rather than the blades. (Another four turbines selected as a control group were responsible for seven bird deaths, excluding willow ptarmigans, over the same timeframe.) And so, in 2013, each of the four turbines in the test group had a single blade painted black. In the three years that followed, only six birds were found dead due to striking their turbine blades. By comparison, 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four control wind turbines -- a 71.9-percent reduction in the annual fatality rate. Digging into the data a little more showed some variation on bird deaths depending upon the season. During spring and autumn, fewer bird deaths were recorded at the painted turbines. But in summer, bird deaths actually increased at the painted turbines, and the authors note that the small number of turbines in the study and its relatively short duration both merit longer-term replication studies, both at Smola and elsewhere. The study has been published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

schwit1 shares a report from The Boston Globe: A new study estimates the Biogen conference held at Boston's Marriott Long Wharf hotel in February played a far greater role in spreading the coronavirus than previously thought. The research team analyzed the genetic sequences of the virus that caused COVID-19 in the 772 patients, almost all from Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, and Suffolk counties. By examining mutations in the genetic code that naturally occur as the virus makes copies of itself -- subtle changes that act like a passport stamp showing where the pathogen has been -- the sleuths identified more than 80 distinct SARS-CoV-2 genomes of viruses that infected the Boston area in the first five months of the year. Most of the viruses came from elsewhere in the United States and Western Europe, the scientists said. But one virus with a unique genetic signature had an outsize impact. Some 289 of the 772 patients, or more than a third, were infected with a virus traceable to the meeting held on Feb. 26-27 by Cambridge biotech Biogen.

In a remarkable sign of how the virus can spread unpredictably and take a disproportionate toll on society's most vulnerable members, the 289 conference-related cases included 122 people living in Boston-area homeless shelters and employees who work there, the study says. It's unclear what path the virus took to get there. By multiplying the proportion of conference-related viral genomes in each of the four counties by the total number of coronavirus infections in Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, the scientists estimate that 20,000 infections could be linked to the Marriott event. The study never mentions Biogen by name. It simply refers to an "international business conference held in Boston from February 26-27." "We never would have knowingly put anyone at risk," it said in a statement. "When we learned a number of our colleagues were ill, we did not know the cause was COVID-19, but we immediately notified public health authorities and took steps to limit the spread."

Nicolas Rougier, a computational neuroscientist and programmer at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology in Bordeaux, writes: I organized with [Konrad Hinsen, a theoretical biophysicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Orleans] the "Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge," whose goal was to check if researchers would be able to run their own code that has been published at least ten years ago (i.e. before 2010). Most participants managed to run it, but it was not without pain. Today, Nature published an article summarizing the different problems we encountered. I myself tried to re-run an Apple II program I wrote 32 years ago on a vintage Apple IIe. This was quite instructive, especially regarding modern software system with the dependencies hell.

Two patients were reinfected with the coronavirus in Europe, according to local broadcasters who confirmed the incidents with virologists. The Hill reports: The patients, one from Belgium and the other from the Netherlands, were confirmed to have been reinfected with COVID-19, Reuters reported. Marian Koopmans, a Dutch virologist, confirmed to broadcaster NOS that the patient from the Netherlands was elderly with a compromised immune system, but did not provide more details about the infection. Koopmans told NOS that in order for reinfection, a virus must change its genetic code. She added during the interview with the broadcaster that, given the veracity of the virus, recurrence of infection was to be expected.

The second patient in Belgium was a woman who had contracted COVID-19 first in March and then a second time in June, Reuters reported. The woman, who was reported to be in her 50s, had a low level of coronavirus antibodies in her system, Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst told broadcaster VRT. Like Koopmans, Van Ranst cited a genetic mutation of the virus that may have been the cause for reinfection. And whether or not the recurrence of infection will be more rampant in the community is still uncertain. Yesterday, researchers in Hong Kong reported the area's first confirmed reinfection of the virus, 4 1/2 months after the patient's initial infection.

Africa has been declared free from wild polio by the independent body, the Africa Regional Certification Commission. From a report: Polio usually affects children under five, sometimes leading to irreversible paralysis. Death can occur when breathing muscles are affected. Twenty-five years ago thousands of children in Africa were paralysed by the virus. The disease is now only found in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is no cure but the polio vaccine protects children for life. Nigeria is the last African country to be declared free from wild polio, having accounted for more than half of all global cases less than a decade ago.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Growing up in a greener urban environment boosts children's intelligence and lowers levels of difficult behavior, a study has found. The analysis of more than 600 children aged 10-15 showed a 3% increase in the greenness of their neighborhood raised their IQ score by an average of 2.6 points. The effect was seen in both richer and poorer areas. There is already significant evidence that green spaces improve various aspects of children's cognitive development but this is the first research to examine IQ. The cause is uncertain but may be linked to lower stress levels, more play and social contact or a quieter environment. The increase in IQ points was particularly significant for those children at the lower end of the spectrum, where small increases could make a big difference, the researchers said.

The study, published in the journal Plos Medicine, used satellite images to measure the level of greenness in neighborhoods, including parks, gardens, street trees and all other vegetation. The average IQ score was 105 but the scientists found 4% of children in areas with low levels of greenery scored below 80, while no children scored below 80 in areas with more greenery. The benefits of more greenery that were recorded in urban areas were not replicated in suburban or rural areas. [T]his may be because those places had enough greenness for all children living there to benefit. Behavioral difficulties such as poor attention and aggressiveness were also measured in the children using a standard rating scale, and the average score was 46. In this case, a 3% rise in greenery resulted in a two-point reduction in behavioral problems, in line with previous studies.

Back in 2012, a team of Japanese and Belgian researchers in Antarctica found a golf ball-sized space rock resting in the snow. Now, NASA astronauts have had a chance to study a piece of that meteorite, Asuka 12236, and they say it may hold new clues about the development of life. From a report: Inside the meteorite, astrobiologists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center found a high concentration of amino acids, particularly aspartic and glutamic acids. Those are two of the 20 amino acids that make millions of proteins, which are essential for the bodily functions of animals. Researchers have found amino acids in other space rocks, but not at such a high concentration. Perhaps most surprisingly, Asuka 12236 contains more left-handed versions of some amino acids. While there are right-handed and left-handed versions of each amino acid, life as we know it uses only left-handed amino acids to build proteins. Researchers want to know why there was an imbalance toward left-handed amino acids and what kinds of space conditions might have led to that. They believe Asuka 12236 was exposed to very little heat or water -- two important clues.

phalse phace writes: Researchers in Hong Kong on Monday reported what appears to be the first confirmed case of Covid-19 reinfection, a 33-year-old man who was first infected by SARS-CoV-2 in late March and then, four and a half months later, seemingly contracted the virus again while traveling in Europe. The case raises questions about the durability of immune protection from the coronavirus.

There have been scattered reports of cases of Covid-19 reinfection. Those reports, though, have been based on anecdotal evidence and largely attributed to flaws in testing. But in this case, researchers at the University of Hong Kong sequenced the virus from the patient's two infections and found that they did not match, indicating the second infection was not tied to the first. There was a difference of 24 nucleotides -- the 'letters' that make up the virus' RNA -- between the two infections. Experts cautioned that this patient's case could be an outlier among the tens of millions of cases around the world and that immune protection may generally last longer than just a few months.

BlenderArtists.org writes: To build and model the universe from the Planck scale to galactic scales requires an incredible number of mathematical computations to simulate particles and their interactions, yet the framework of nature and the physics of these interactions should be simple. Blender's physics engine provides a good base to begin this project, but it will take work from the community to accurately model subatomic particles.
That's where "Quantum Microscope" comes in. It's a newly open sourced add-on for Blender that simulates subatomic particles and the formation of matter using classical physics. "It provides a microscopic look at molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei, particles and spacetime, using the theoretical model from Energy Wave Theory," explains its web page, linking to a video summarizing some of its features.

And that's just the beginning, writes Slashdot reader atomicphysics: A contest begins September 1, 2020 for developers to enhance the add-on, or create a new simulator meeting project requirements to use classical physics for the quantum realm, with at least $15,000 in prizes being awarded over the next year.

A new cluster of Covid-19 cases in New Zealand prompted a widespread investigation to identify where they're coming from. The New Zealand Herald reports: Nearly 90 new cases of Covid-19 have now been linked back to the new cluster, which itself stemmed from an "index case" — a 50-year-old man working at Mt Wellington's Americold coolstore, with no history or link to overseas travel. Contact tracers have been trying to work backwards from that index case, who tested positive on August 11, in hopes of finding the "primary case" — or the person who brought the virus into the country in the first place.

Friday — more than a week and 175,000 tests since the start of the outbreak — Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shared some details on how exhaustive that process had been. Virtually all of the country's border and managed isolation staff have been tested in the past 10 days, and so far there had been no additional cases, outside the mystery infection of a maintenance worker at Auckland's Rydges hotel...

University of Auckland microbiologist Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles says it's quite possible we'll never get any further. "Is that a big deal? From the testing we've done so far, it looks like this is a pretty tight cluster — so I would say, no," she said. "What we have lost is the opportunity to know how it happened, or what gaps need plugging. But at the same time, we have to remember that nothing is 100 per cent guaranteed to work all of the time."

"SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led company that recently became the first business in history to send astronauts into Earth's orbit, is parlaying its successes into big money," reports CNN Business: The company recently finished a $1.9 billion funding round, one of the largest single fundraising pushes by any privately held company, according to public filings and data aggregated by venture capital data firm Crunchbase. That brings SpaceX's overall valuation to $46 billion... SpaceX now ranks third on a list of so-called "unicorns," which are privately held startups with valuations topping $1 billion, according to data from the venture capital analysis firm CB Insights. The only two startups valued higher than SpaceX are two Chinese tech giants — rideshare company Didi Chuxing and TikTok parent company ByteDance...

But even at SpaceX's eye-popping valuation, some Wall Street analysts and investors argue the company is still undervalued. Morgan Stanley analysts, for example, wrote in a report last month that SpaceX could be worth as much as $200 billion if its experimental satellite-internet project, Starlink, works as intended. Morgan Stanley said its low-end estimate for SpaceX's value is about $50 billion. And SpaceX's other ventures — including launching astronauts and cargo for NASA, building massive prototypes for a would-be Mars rocket, and launching satellites for the US military — all give investors plenty of reason to clamor for a chance to own a piece of SpaceX, according to Chad Anderson, a SpaceX investor and the CEO of investment firm Space Angels...

Anderson added that SpaceX still isn't turning a profit, but that's mostly because it's still spending large sums of money investing in new arms of its business, including the Starlink internet business and its Mars rocket prototypes, dubbed Starship. And that does leave some room for debate when it comes to the question of whether SpaceX's valuation is too high. "I think there would probably be an argument both ways," he said. "I think there's definitely a lot of SpaceX haters or naysayers."

The Texas Advanced Computer Center talks to Masahiro (Hiro) Ono, who leads the Robotic Surface Mobility Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which led all the Mars rover missions (also one of the researchers who developed the software that allows the current rover to operate): The Perseverance rover, which launched this summer, computes using RAD 750s — radiation-hardened single board computers manufactured by BAE Systems Electronics. Future missions, however, would potentially use new high-performance, multi-core radiation hardened processors designed through the High Performance Spaceflight Computing project. (Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor is also being tested for missions.) These chips will provide about one hundred times the computational capacity of current flight processors using the same amount of power. "All of the autonomy that you see on our latest Mars rover is largely human-in-the-loop" — meaning it requires human interaction to operate, according to Chris Mattmann, the deputy chief technology and innovation officer at JPL. "Part of the reason for that is the limits of the processors that are running on them. One of the core missions for these new chips is to do deep learning and machine learning, like we do terrestrially, on board. What are the killer apps given that new computing environment...?"

Training machine learning models on the Maverick2 supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), as well as on Amazon Web Services and JPL clusters, Ono, Mattmann and their team have been developing two novel capabilities for future Mars rovers, which they call Drive-By Science and Energy-Optimal Autonomous Navigation.... "We'd like future rovers to have a human-like ability to see and understand terrain," Ono said. "For rovers, energy is very important. There's no paved highway on Mars. The drivability varies substantially based on the terrain — for instance beach versus bedrock. That is not currently considered. Coming up with a path with all of these constraints is complicated, but that's the level of computation that we can handle with the HPSC or Snapdragon chips. But to do so we're going to need to change the paradigm a little bit."

Ono explains that new paradigm as commanding by policy, a middle ground between the human-dictated: "Go from A to B and do C," and the purely autonomous: "Go do science."

Commanding by policy involves pre-planning for a range of scenarios, and then allowing the rover to determine what conditions it is encountering and what it should do. "We use a supercomputer on the ground, where we have infinite computational resources like those at TACC, to develop a plan where a policy is: if X, then do this; if y, then do that," Ono explained. "We'll basically make a huge to-do list and send gigabytes of data to the rover, compressing it in huge tables. Then we'll use the increased power of the rover to de-compress the policy and execute it." The pre-planned list is generated using machine learning-derived optimizations. The on-board chip can then use those plans to perform inference: taking the inputs from its environment and plugging them into the pre-trained model. The inference tasks are computationally much easier and can be computed on a chip like those that may accompany future rovers to Mars.

"The rover has the flexibility of changing the plan on board instead of just sticking to a sequence of pre-planned options," Ono said. "This is important in case something bad happens or it finds something interesting...." The efforts to develop a new AI-based paradigm for future autonomous missions can be applied not just to rovers but to any autonomous space mission, from orbiters to fly-bys to interstellar probes, Ono says.

Syfy reports: Soaring into the wild blue yonder and beyond, the planet's only non-capsule, private orbital spacecraft, Dream Chaser, is slated to make its first flight sometime next year shuttling supplies and cargo to the International Space Station for NASA.

This stylish unmanned space plane was recently given its official name, Tenacity, and a pair of exotic composite material wings to complete its sleek design. Constructed by the Colorado-based aerospace firm Sierra Nevada Corporation, Dream Chaser is meant to launch vertically atop a booster rocket and completes its missions with gliding runway landings similar to NASA's retired fleet of space shuttles... NASA chose Dream Chaser as one of the flagship services for its Commercial Resupply Services 2 program, selecting Sierra Nevada to embark on 12 uncrewed cargo trips to the ISS by 2024.
The company's communications director calls it "an SUV for space -- a Space Utility Vehicle.

"Our dream is to have a whole fleet of space planes."

The Telegraph reports: Peter Scott-Morgan stands, wide-eyed and tearful. "Good. Grief." he says quietly. "I was unprepared for the emotion... It's quite extraordinary. It really is." Using an exoskeleton, Scott-Morgan is experiencing what it is like to stand for the first time in months after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2017, the same incurable condition that killed scientist Stephen Hawking.

The remarkable step, however, is just the first in the 62-year-old's bold journey to control his disease by becoming the world's first, full-fledged cyborg. "Think of it as a science experiment," he laughs. "This is cyborg territory, and I intend to be a human guinea pig to see just how far we can turn science fiction into reality." Eventually, Scott-Morgan wants the exoskeleton to encase his upper body, giving him superhuman strength and the ability to tower above "flesh and blood" humans. A mind-reading computer will be plugged directly into his brain, expressing his thoughts almost instantly. Meanwhile, his paralyzed face will be replaced by a hyper-realistic avatar that will move in time with a speech synthesizer...

Scott-Morgan says he isn't deteriorating but becoming a new version of himself — one that will eventually pave the way for a breed of humans that can augment their capabilities using technology... Instead of answering a question by laboriously typing out individual letters using a gaze tracker, in a similar way to Hawking, he will rely on the AI to provide a full and instant response. Eventually, the machine will speak for itself using phrases it has learned from Scott-Morgan — crossing a controversial line in what it means to be human....

Someday, the scientist hopes he can exist completely outside his physical body, with his personality, traits and knowledge downloaded on to a machine.

Citizen scientists have spotted almost 100 of our sun's nearest neighbors. Space.com reports: In a new study, members of the public -- including both professional scientists and volunteers -- discovered 95 brown dwarfs (celestial objects too big to be considered planets and too small to be considered stars) near our sun through the NASA-funded citizen science project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. They made this discovery with the help of astronomers using the National Science Foundations National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. Brown dwarfs are unusual celestial objects -- much heavier than planets but not massive enough to become stars. The celestial objects can be seriously hot (think thousands of degrees Fahrenheit), but these 95 newly-discovered neighbors are surprisingly cool. Some of these weird worlds are even relatively close to Earth's temperature and could be cool enough to have water clouds in their atmospheres, according to the statement.

Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now more than 11 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong. From a report: At the end of January, for instance, the robotic probe executed a routine somersault to beam scientific data back to Earth when an error triggered a shutdown of some of its functions. "Everybody was extremely worried about recovering the spacecraft," said Suzanne Dodd, who is the Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's managers on our planet know what to do when such a fault occurs. Although it takes about a day and a half to talk to Voyager 2 at its current distance, they sent commands to restore its normal operations.

But starting on Monday for the next 11 months, they won't be able to get word to the spry spacecraft in case something again goes wrong (although the probe can still stream data back to Earth). Upgrades and repairs are prompting NASA to take offline a key piece of space age equipment used to beam messages all around the solar system. The downtime is necessary because of a flood of new missions to Mars scheduled to leave Earth this summer. But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades.