AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: China has launched its first rover mission to Mars. The six-wheeled robot, encapsulated in a protective probe, was lifted off Earth by a Long March 5 rocket from the Wenchang spaceport on Hainan Island at 12:40 local time (04:40 GMT). It should arrive in orbit around the Red Planet in February. Called Tianwen-1, or "Questions to Heaven," the rover won't actually try to land on the surface for a further two to three months. This wait-and-see strategy was used successfully by the American Viking landers in the 1970s. It will allow engineers to assess the atmospheric conditions on Mars before attempting what will be a hazardous descent. Tianwen-1 is one of three missions setting off to Mars in the space of 11 days. On Monday, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched its Hope satellite towards the Red Planet. And in a week from now, the U.S. space agency (Nasa) aims to despatch its next-generation rover, Perseverance.

AleRunner writes: The United States on Tuesday recorded more than 1,000 daily deaths from COVID-19 for the first time since May, according to Politico. This trend continued and actually increased on Wednesday with over 1,200 deaths. Whilst there have been suggestions that the increase in cases in the US was an artifact of greater testing, the new data on deaths makes it starkly clear that these suggestions were wrong and that cases are increasing at a greater rate than testing, meaning that the official death rate is going to continue increasing for some time. Even these shocking numbers are likely an underestimate with reputable researchers having shown that many COVID-19 deaths have been registered under other causes. More than half a million people worldwide are dead and 15 million are infected, however the U.S. remains world leader in coronavirus cases with Brazil still far behind in second place.

The UK and US have accused Russia of launching a weapon-like projectile from a satellite in space. Joe2020 shares a report: In a statement, the head of the UK's space directorate said: "We are concerned by the manner in which Russia tested one of its satellites by launching a projectile with the characteristics of a weapon." The statement said actions like this "threaten the peaceful use of space." The US has previously raised concerns about this Russian satellite. In his statement, Air Vice Marshal Harvey Smyth, head of the UK's space directorate, said: "Actions like this threaten the peaceful use of space and risk causing debris that could pose a threat to satellites and the space systems on which the world depends. We call on Russia to avoid any further such testing. We also urge Russia to continue to work constructively with the UK and other partners to encourage responsible behaviour in space."

In a new report on Science Advances, Minwoo Choi and a team of scientists in Electronic Engineering and Materials Science in the Republic of Korea, developed a wearable, full-colour OLED display using a two-dimensional (2-D) material-based backplane transistor. Phys.Org reports: They engineered an 18-by-18 thin-film transistor array on a thin molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) film and transferred it to an aluminium oxide (Al2O3)/polyethylene terephthalate (PET) surface. Choi et al. then deposited red, green and blue OLED pixels on the device surface and observed excellent mechanical and electrical properties of the 2-D material. The surface could drive circuits to control the OLED pixels to form an ultrathin, wearable device.

In this work, Choi et al. developed a large-area MoS2 TFT array to operate 324 pixels in a 2-inch RGB OLED, in which the full-color display demonstrated an active-matrix configuration. The RGB OLEDs were made of different optoelectronic characteristics, therefore the team designed the backplane TFTs to control each color pixel. The experimental setup was promising as a wearable display and functioned steadily on human skin without adverse effects. The team used heterogenous material designs to form optoelectronics in the present work. [...] The low stiffness of the ultrathin device prevented the deterioration of optical and electrical properties during substantial mechanical deformation reflexes -- after its transfer to a human hand. Based on the current-voltage characteristics (I-V), the current level did not change during skin shrinkage or skin stretching exercises and the on-state also did not fluctuate during active-matrix display operation. While the device stability is still in development, the team aim to conduct further engineering to improve the MoS2 film for practical applications as a wearable, full-color AMOLED display.

A reader shares a report from Live Science: After five years of peering into the deepest reaches of space, researchers have released what they call the "largest three-dimensional map of the universe" ever. No, you cannot see your house. The mind-boggling map is the result of an ongoing project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) -- an ambitious, international quest to map the expansion of the observable universe, and hopefully solve a few cosmic conundrums in the process. With this newest update, the project has mapped and measured more than 2 million galaxies, stretching from our Milky Way to ancient objects more than 11 billion light-years away.

The detailed new map will help astronomers piece together a murky period of the universe's expansion known as "the gap." The gap begins a few billion years after the Big Bang. Scientists are able to measure the rate of the universe's expansion before this thanks to the cosmic microwave background -- ancient radiation left over from the infancy of the universe that researchers can still detect; and they can calculate recent expansion by measuring how the distance between Earth and nearby galaxies increases over time. But expansion in the middle period has been little studied because the light of galaxies more than a few hundred million light-years away can be incredibly faint. To fill in the gap, a team of more than 100 scientists from around the world looked at not just distant galaxies, but also bright-burning quasars (extremely luminous objects powered by the hungriest black holes in the cosmos). The astronomers described their findings in 23 new studies released on July 20. The press release from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) can be viewed here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: For years scientists have sought to create the ultimate cancer-screening test -- one that can reliably detect a malignancy early, before tumor cells spread and when treatments are more effective. A new method reported today in Nature Communications brings researchers a step closer to that goal. By using a blood test, the international team was able to diagnose cancer long before symptoms appeared in nearly all the people it tested who went on to develop cancer. [...] Kun Zhang, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the study, and his colleagues began collecting samples from people before they had any signs that they had cancer. In 2007 the researchers began recruiting more than 123,000 healthy individuals in Taizhou, China, to undergo annual health checks -- an effort that required building a specialized warehouse to store the more than 1.6 million samples they eventually accrued. Around 1,000 participants developed cancer over the next 10 years.

Zhang and his colleagues focused on developing a test for five of the most common types of cancer: stomach, esophageal, colorectal, lung and liver malignancies. The test they developed, called PanSeer, detects methylation patterns in which a chemical group is added to DNA to alter genetic activity. Past studies have shown that abnormal methylation can signal various types of cancer, including pancreatic and colon cancer. The PanSeer test works by isolating DNA from a blood sample and measuring DNA methylation at 500 locations previously identified as having the greatest chance of signaling the presence of cancer. A machine-learning algorithm compiles the findings into a single score that indicates a person's likelihood of having the disease. The researchers tested blood samples from 191 participants who eventually developed cancer, paired with the same number of matching healthy individuals. They were able to detect cancer up to four years before symptoms appeared with roughly 90 percent accuracy and a 5 percent false-positive rate.

Scott K. Johnson writes via Ars Technica: One of the most important numbers in climate science is 3C. This isn't about a projection of future warming or the impacts that come with it, though. It's about how much warming you get if you double the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. That value can be made more general as a metric known as "climate sensitivity," which describes how much warming you get for a given amount of emissions. If the number is small, we can burn a lot of fossil fuels with minimal consequences. If the number is extremely high, emissions are extraordinarily dangerous. This number is commonly defined against a doubling of the concentration of CO2 in the air, in part because CO2's effect is logarithmic and each doubling is roughly equivalent. Calculations of this value go back to the turn of the 20th century, when the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius came up with numbers in the 4-6C range. But a major milestone was reached in 1979, when a group of scientists released a climate report that included this value. The scientists wrote, "We estimate the most probable global warming for a doubling of CO2 to be near 3C with a probable error of +/-1.5C."

Despite all the scientific progress since then, that answer (1.5-4.5ÂC) has held up. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report tightened it up a bit to 2.0-4.5C, but then a handful of studies released just before their 2013 report caused confusion that led to a return to the old 1.5-4.5C range. Shrinking that range has been a goal of climate scientists, though the problem has proved stubborn. In a notable step forward, a group of 25 climate scientists published a study this week that presents a new synthesis of the evidence. And they conclude that a narrower range is warranted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Scores of Russia's business and political elite have been given early access to an experimental vaccine against Covid-19, according to people familiar with the effort, as the country races to be among the first to develop an inoculation. Top executives at companies including aluminum giant United Co. Rusal, as well as billionaire tycoons and government officials began getting shots developed by the state-run Gamaleya Institute in Moscow as early as April, the people said. They declined to be identified as the information isn't public.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who recovered from Covid-19 after being hospitalized with the virus in May, said he doesn't know the names of anyone who's received the institute's vaccine. Peskov's comments followed a Health Ministry statement that said only participants in Gamaleya's trials are currently eligible for the jabs. While the new shots are "safe" because they're based on proven vaccines for other diseases, their effectiveness has yet to be determined, according to Sergei Netesov, a former executive at Vector, a state-run virology center in Novosibirsk, Siberia, that's also working on an inoculation. "Those who take it do so at their own risk," Netesov said.

Scientists have identified 37 volcanic structures on Venus that appear to be recently active -- and probably still are today -- painting the picture of a geologically dynamic planet and not a dormant world as long thought. NBC News reports: The research focused on ring-like structures called coronae, caused by an upwelling of hot rock from deep within the planet's interior, and provided compelling evidence of widespread recent tectonic and magma activity on Venus's surface, researchers said on Monday. Coronae are essentially fields of lava flows and major faults spanning a large circular area. Many of the 37 reside within in a gigantic ring in the planet's Southern Hemisphere, including a colossal corona called Artemis 1,300 miles (2,100 km) in diameter.

Many scientists long had thought Venus, lacking the plate tectonics that gradually reshape Earth's surface, was essentially dormant geologically for the past half billion years. The researchers determined the type of geological features that could exist only in a recently active corona - a telltale trench surrounding the structure. Then they scoured radar images of Venus from NASA's Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s to find coronae that fit the bill. Of 133 coronae examined, 37 appear to have been active in the past 2 million to 3 million years, a blink of the eye in geological time. The research has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The ramps for disabled people that smooth entry into many public buildings today aren't a modern invention. The ancient Greeks constructed similar ramps of stone to help individuals who had trouble walking or climbing stairs access holy sites, new research suggests. That would make the ramps -- some more than 2300 years old -- the oldest known evidence of architecture designed to meet the needs of the disabled.

Archaeologist Debby Sneed focused on the fourth century B.C.E., when sanctuaries to Asclepius -- the Greek god of healing -- proliferated. She found that the two best documented healing sanctuaries she looked at were outfitted with more ramps than other sacred sites, and that their ramps were more likely to access buildings other than the main temple. At Asclepius's main sanctuary at Epidaurus, near Athens, for example, a broad stone ramp led up to the temple. Two more ramps led through the sanctuary gates. And a series of smaller side buildings also feature narrow ramps just wide enough to walk up, Sneed reports today in Antiquity. High stairs would be hard for people using crutches. And though wheelchairs wouldn't be invented for more than 1,000 years, visitors to healing shrines who couldn't walk sometimes had to be carried on litters or stretchers -- both easier to navigate up a ramp.

"The risk of nasty side effects in the Moderna and Oxford trials should be made clear now, before it ends up as fodder for the skeptics," argues Hilda Bastian, a former consumer health care advocate and a Ph.D. student at Bond University who studies evidence-based medicine. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from her article via Wired: On Monday, vaccine researchers from Oxford University and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced results from a "Phase 1/2 trial," suggesting their product might be able to generate immunity without causing serious harm. Similar, but smaller-scale results, were posted just last week for another candidate vaccine produced by the biotech firm Moderna, in collaboration with the U.S. National Institutes of Health. [...] Back in May, a CNN report described the Oxford group as being "the most aggressive in painting the rosiest picture" of its product, so let's start with them. Just how rosy is the Oxford picture really? It's certainly true that this week's news shows the vaccine has the potential to provide protection from Covid-19. But there are flies in the ointment. After the first clinical trial for this vaccine began in April, for example, the researchers added new study arms in which people got acetaminophen every six hours for 24 hours after the injection. That's not featured in their marketing, of course, and I saw no discussion of this unusual step in media coverage in early summer. Newspapers only said the vaccine had been proven "safe with rhesus monkeys," and did not cause any adverse effects in those animal tests. It was a worrying signal though: How rough a ride were people having with this vaccine? Was the acetaminophen meant to keep down fever, headaches, malaise -- or all of the above?

The press release for Monday's publication of results from the Oxford vaccine trials described an increased frequency of "minor side effects" among participants. A look at the actual paper, though, reveals this to be a marketing spin that has since been parroted in media reports. Yes, mild reactions were far more common than worse ones. But moderate or severe harms -- defined as being bad enough to interfere with daily life or needing medical care -- were common, too. Around one-third of people vaccinated with the Covid-19 vaccine without acetaminophen experienced moderate or severe chills, fatigue, headache, malaise, and/or feverishness. Close to 10 percent had a fever of at least 100.4 degrees and just over one-fourth developed moderate or severe muscle aches. That's a lot, in a young and healthy group of people -- and the acetaminophen didn't help much for most of those problems. The paper's authors designated the vaccine as "acceptable" and "tolerated," but we don't yet know how acceptable this will be to most people.

There is another red flag. Clinical trials for other Covid-19 vaccines have placebo groups, where participants receive saline injections. Only one of the Oxford vaccine trials is taking this approach, however; the others instead compare the experimental treatment to an injected meningococcal vaccine. There can be good reasons to do this: Non-placebo injections may mimic telltale signs that you've received an active vaccine, such as a skin reaction, making the trial more truly "blind." But their use also opens the door to doubt-sowing claims that any harms of the new vaccine are getting buried among the harms already caused by the control-group, "old" vaccines.What about the Moderna vaccine? "According to the press release from May, there were no serious adverse events for the people in that particular dosage group," reports Wired. "But last week's paper shows the full results: By the time they'd had two doses, every single one was showing signs of headaches, chills or fatigue; and for at least 80 percent this could have been enough to interfere with their normal activities. A participant who had a severe reaction to a particularly high dose has talked in detail about how bad it was: If reactions even half as bad as this were to be common for some of these vaccines, they will be hard sells once they reach the community -- and there could be a lot of people who are reluctant to get the second injection."

UPDATE 7/27/20: Slashdot interviewed Oxford Vaccine Trial participant Jennifer Riggins and asked what her reaction was to Wired's article. Riggins is an American technology journalist and marketer who's self-employed in London. Here's what she said:

"I think the article is a poorly written, poorly researched opinion piece. It says offering acetaminophen or paracetamol is unusual with vaccines. I'm a working mom with a three-year-old, and you are told to give them acetaminophen or paracetamol before all live vaccines as they can cause discomfort and fever for the first 24 to 48 hours.

"I'm actually surprised this article was in Wired that tends to be reputable. It seems to be written by a vaccine skeptic at best who knows little about them. This is a dangerous message because we most likely won't have a widely distributed vaccine til 2021 at earliest. Even longer if you consider, like the chicken pox vaccine, it needs a booster for efficacy. This flu season is going to be awful and then combined with this coronavirus. Add to that less kids are getting vaccinated or at least are delayed during the pandemic. Any antivaxxer message is incredibly dangerous. We won't be able to have herd immunity for Covid-19 by winter but we could for the flu which will save so many lives."

The first Arab space mission to Mars has blasted off aboard a rocket from Japan, with its unmanned probe -- called Al-Amal, or Hope -- successfully separating about an hour after liftoff. The Guardian reports: The Emirati project is one of three racing to Mars, including Tianwen-1 from China and Mars 2020 from the United States, taking advantage of a period when the Earth and Mars are nearest. In October, Mars will be a comparatively short 38.6m miles (62m km) from Earth, according to Nasa. Hope is expected to reach Mars's orbit by February 2021, marking the 50th anniversary of the unification of the UAE, an alliance of seven emirates. Unlike the two other Mars ventures scheduled for this year, it will not land on the planet, but instead orbit it for a whole Martian year, or 687 days.

While the objective of the Mars mission is to provide a comprehensive image of the weather dynamics in the red planet's atmosphere, the probe is a foundation for a much bigger goal -- building a human settlement on Mars within the next 100 years. The UAE also wants the project to serve as a source of inspiration for Arab youth, in a region too often wracked by sectarian conflicts and economic crises. On Twitter, the UAE's government declared the probe launch a "message of pride, hope and peace to the Arab region, in which we renew the golden age of Arab and Islamic discoveries."

Researchers from the University of Stirling, UK, have embedded ceramic spheres in aluminum foam to create a material that couldn't be cut with angle grinders, power drills or water jet cutters. "They dubbed it Proteus after the shape-shifting Greek god, for the way the material metamorphosed in different ways to defend against attacks," reports New Scientists. From the report: "It's pretty amazing," says Miranda Anderson at the University of Stirling, UK, who worked on the project. Rather than just being a hard surface that resists external pressure, the material turns the force of the drill or cutting mechanism back on itself, as the ceramic spheres create vibrations that disrupt the external force. "It actually destroys the cutting blade through the sideways jerky vibrations that it creates, or it widens the water jet's spray," says Anderson.

The material has a second defense mechanism. Attempting to cut it breaks the ceramic spheres into smaller fragments which are even harder and act like very tough sandpaper. "So the attack mechanism causes the material to become more resistant to the attack," says Anderson. While an angle grinder took 45 seconds to cut through steel armor used to protect against explosive mines, it was rendered inoperative by Proteus. The only comparable structure in the natural world is diamond, says Anderson, but Proteus is cheaper and lighter, making it practical for a range of applications, from security doors and barriers to shoe soles or elbow pad and forearm guards for workers. She believes it can be mass-produced, as there is no shortage of the metals and ceramics it is made from. The new material has been reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: So many of us do it: You get into bed, turn off the lights, and look at your phone to check Twitter one more time. You see that coronavirus infections are up. Maybe your kids can't go back to school. The economy is cratering. Still, you incessantly scroll though bottomless doom-and-gloom news for hours as you sink into a pool of despair. This self-destructive behavior has become so common that a new word for it has entered our lexicon: "doomscrolling." The recent onslaught of dystopian stories related to the coronavirus pandemic, combined with stay-at-home orders, have enabled our penchant for binging on bad news. But the habit is eroding our mental health, experts say. [C]linical psychologist Dr. Amelia Aldao warns that doomscrolling traps us in a "vicious cycle of negativity" that fuels our anxiety. "Our minds are wired to look out for threats," she says. "The more time we spend scrolling, the more we find those dangers, the more we get sucked into them, the more anxious we get." Aldao, the director of Together CBT, a clinic that specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy, has worked with her patients to cut back on doomscrolling. Here's some of her advice on how to temper the doom:

Set a timer. I work mostly with clients who experience anxiety and part of what I've been doing with them now for weeks, for months, is actually setting limits to how much they're scrolling. And I literally tell them, "Set up a timer." You do want to know what's happening in the world, so the solution isn't to never go online again, but it's finding boundaries.

Stay cognizant. Going into it, opening up your phone, reminding yourself why you're there, what are you looking for, what information are you trying to find. And then periodically checking in with yourself -- have I found what I needed?

Swap 'vicious cycles' for 'virtuous cycles.' Whether it's ice cream, connecting with friends, sending something funny to a friend -- those are the things we should spend more time doing just to build positive emotions in our lives.

A coronavirus vaccine the University of Oxford is developing with AstraZeneca showed promising results in early human testing, a sign of progress in the high-stakes pursuit of a shot to defeat the pathogen. From a report: The vaccine increased levels of both protective neutralizing antibodies and immune T-cells that target the virus, according to the study organizers. The results were published Monday in The Lancet medical journal. BBC adds: Trials involving around 1,077 people showed the injection led to them making antibodies and white blood cells that can fight coronavirus. The findings are hugely promising, but it is still too soon to know if this is enough to offer protection and larger trials are under way. The UK has already ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine.

Slashdot reader destinyland writes: On April 7th, a Trump campaign advisor told the Los Angeles Times "One way we still win this election is by turning it into a referendum on China." Within weeks the Washington Post noted "reports that the Trump administration has sought to pressure U.S. intelligence agencies to search for proof of a link between the Wuhan lab and the covid-19 outbreak." And that same month selected portions of two diplomatic cables from 2018 were leaked to the Washington Post, and published in a controversial "opinion piece."

The Post requested "expedited processing" for the release of the complete text of both cables — a routine request which was nevertheless denied. (Though a virologist at Columbia University shared a rebuttal in memes.) The complete text of the cables has now been released — and the additional information undercuts the story line that the lab — which was located a full nine miles from the market at the center of the outbreak — was anything less than safe. Though the Post's opinion piece had highlighted a clause about "a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory" — the diplomats had actually been concerned instead that the shortage would interfere with the lab's productivity and utilization — and not it's safety.

And there was apparently more information in the cable which was withheld. CNN reports:

The January 2018 cable, obtained by the Washington Post after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, noted that ties between the WIV and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston could help alleviate the shortage and that, reportedly, the US-based institution was training technicians to work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). A second cable about the WIV from April 2018 cited a French official who said that "French experts have provided guidance and biosafety training to the lab, which will continue...."

Back in April a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development surmised the misleading excerpts from the cables had come from "an administration official with an obvious axe to grind." And this weekend the Columbia University virologist reacted to what the cable's full text revealed about the high safety standards at the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

"This cable says NOTHING about concerns with the work that was being done at WIV. The supposedly worrisome work was actually presented as a success story in a lab that was coming online more slowly than everyone — including the US authors of the cable — expected or hoped."

The United Arab Emirates has successfully launched a spacecraft towards an orbit around Mars, reports the New York Times. Built by a space physics lab at the University of Colorado, the Hope Mars probe was tested in Dubai, before being shipped to Japan's Tanegashima Island, where it was launched by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The launch is being streamed on the web and on YouTube. It will join a fleet of six other spacecrafts studying the red planet from space, three operated by NASA, two by the European Space Agency (one shared with Russia) and one by India. Each contains different instruments to help further research of the Martian atmosphere and surface.

The Hope orbiter is carrying three instruments: an infrared spectrometer, an ultraviolet spectrometer and a camera. From its high orbit — varying from 12,400 miles to 27,000 miles above the surface — the spacecraft will give planetary scientists their first global view of Martian weather at all times of day. Over its two-year mission, it will investigate how dust storms and other weather phenomena near the Martian surface have either speed or slow the loss of the planet's atmosphere into space.
"You'll be hearing a lot about Mars this summer," the Times adds. "Three missions are launching toward the red planet, taking advantage of the way Earth and its neighbor get closer every 26 months or so, allowing a relatively short trip between the two worlds." The next expected launch will be China's Tianwen-1, which could occur between later this week through early August... On July 30, NASA is scheduled to launch Perseverance, a robotic rover that will be the fifth wheeled American vehicle to explore Mars... A fourth mission, the joint Russian-European Rosalind Franklin rover, was to launch this summer, too. But technical hurdles, aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic, could not be overcome in time to meet the launch window. It is now scheduled to launch in 2022.
If the other three spacecraft all launch successfully, they should arrive at Mars early next year.

Discover magazine reports: For years, many artificial intelligence enthusiasts and researchers have promised that machine learning will change modern medicine. Thousands of algorithms have been developed to diagnose conditions like cancer, heart disease and psychiatric disorders. Now, algorithms are being trained to detect COVID-19 by recognizing patterns in CT scans and X-ray images of the lungs.

Many of these models aim to predict which patients will have the most severe outcomes and who will need a ventilator. The excitement is palpable; if these models are accurate, they could offer doctors a huge leg up in testing and treating patients with the coronavirus. But the allure of AI-aided medicine for the treatment of real COVID-19 patients appears far off. A group of statisticians around the world are concerned about the quality of the vast majority of machine learning models and the harm they may cause if hospitals adopt them any time soon.

So far, their reviews of COVID-19 machine learning models aren't good: They suffer from a serious lack of data and necessary expertise from a wide array of research fields. But the issues facing new COVID-19 algorithms aren't new at all: AI models in medical research have been deeply flawed for years...
"The main problems appear to be (perhaps unsurprisingly) a lack of necessary data, and not enough domain expertise," writes Slashdot reader shirappu: The leader of the above group of statisticians, Maarten van Smeden, pointed to a lack of collaboration between researchers as a road block in the way of developing truly accurate models. "You need expertise not only of the modeler," he said, "but you need statisticians, epidemiologists and clinicians to work together to make something that is actually useful."
One biostatistician has even been arguing that with many current AI models, medical researchers are using machine learning to "torture their data until it spits out a confession."

Saturday the Washington Post (in an article republished in Stars and Stripes) took a closer look at what's known as "superspreading events": Many scientists say such infection bursts — probably sparked by a single, highly infectious individual who may show no signs of illness and unwittingly share an enclosed space with many others — are driving the pandemic. They worry these cases, rather than routine transmission between one infected person and, say, two or three close contacts, are propelling case counts out of control...

Transmission, it turns out, is far more idiosyncratic than previously understood. Scientists say they believe it is dependent on such factors as an individual's infectivity, which can vary person to person by billions of virus particles, whether the particles are contained in large droplets that fall to the ground or in fine vapor that can float much further, and how much the air in a particular space circulates. Donald Milton, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland, and other experts have wondered if superspreading events could be the "Achilles' heel" of the virus. If we could pinpoint the conditions under which these clusters occur, Milton argued, we could lower the transmission rate enough to extinguish the spread. "If you could stop these events, you could stop the pandemic," Milton said. "You would crush the curve..."

Some people will not transmit the virus to anyone, contact tracing has shown, while others appear to spread the virus with great efficiency. Overall, researchers have estimated in recent studies that some 10 to 20 percent of the infected may be responsible for 80 percent of all cases... An infected person's viral load can impact how much they "shed"; the differences have been shown to be on a scale of billions of virus particles... A growing body of evidence suggests that SARS-CoV2, like other coronaviruses, expands in a community in fits and starts, rather than more evenly over space and time....

While it's often impossible to identify the person who triggered an outbreak, there have been some commonalities among those who have been pinpointed as the likely source in studies. They tend to be young. Asymptomatic. Social. Scientists suspect these "super-emitters" may have much higher levels of the virus in their bodies than others, or may release them by talking, shouting or singing in a different way from most people... In a study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases by Japan's Hitoshi Oshitani at Tohoku University of 22 superspreading individuals with the coronavirus, about half were under the age of 40, and 41 percent were experiencing no symptoms.

sciencehabit shares an article from Science magazine: Dogs are renowned for their world-class noses, but a new study suggests they may have an additional — albeit hidden — sensory talent: a magnetic compass. The sense appears to allow them to use Earth's magnetic field to calculate shortcuts in unfamiliar terrain. The finding is a first in dogs, says Catherine Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies "magnetoreception" and navigation in turtles...

There were already hints that dogs — like many animals, and maybe even humans — can perceive Earth's magnetic field. In 2013, Hynek Burda, a sensory ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague who has worked on magnetic reception for 3 decades, and colleagues showed dogs tend to orient themselves north-south while urinating or defecating. Because this behavior is involved in marking and recognizing territory, Burda reasoned the alignment helps dogs figure out the location relative to other spots.
Lohmann and a graduate student tracked the path of dogs on 233 separate trips spread out over three years: In 170 of these trips, the dogs stopped before they turned back and ran for about 20 meters along a north-south axis. When the animals did this, they tended to get back to the owner via a more direct route than when they didn't, the authors report in eLife...

Burda thinks the dogs run along a north-south axis to figure out which way they are. "It's the most plausible explanation," he says. Lohmann says the implication is that dogs can remember their previous heading and use the reference to the magnetic compass to figure out the most direct route home.