sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957, the United States responded with its own spy satellites. The espionage program, known as Corona, sought to locate Soviet missile sites, but its Google Earth-like photography captured something unintended: snapshots of animals and their habitats frozen in time. Now, by comparing these images with modern data, scientists have found a way to track the decline of biodiversity in regions that lack historic records.

The researchers tested the approach on bobak marmot (Marmota bobak) populations in the grassland region of northern Kazakhstan. There, Soviets converted millions of hectares of natural habitat into cropland in the 1960s. The scientists searched the satellites' black and white film images on a U.S. Geological Survey database for signs of the squirrel-like animal's burrows. They identified more than 5,000 historic marmot homes and compared them with contemporary digital images of the region, mapping more than 12,000 marmot burrows in all. About eight generations of marmots occupied the same burrows in the study area over more than 50 years, even when their habitats underwent major changes, the team reports in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Overall, the researchers estimate the number of marmot burrows dropped by 14% since the '60s. But the number of burrows in some of the oldest fields -- those persistently disturbed by humans plowing grassland to plant wheat -- plunged by much more -- about 60%.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A biochemicals company in the Netherlands hopes to kickstart investment in a pioneering project that hopes to make plastics from plant sugars rather than fossil fuels. The plans, devised by renewable chemicals company Avantium, have already won the support of beer-maker Carlsberg, which hopes to sell its pilsner in a cardboard bottle lined with an inner layer of plant plastic. Avantium's chief executive, Tom van Aken, says he hopes to greenlight a major investment in the world-leading bioplastics plant in the Netherlands by the end of the year. The project, which remains on track despite the coronavirus lockdown, is set to reveal partnerships with other food and drink companies later in the summer.

The project has the backing of Coca-Cola and Danone, which hope to secure the future of their bottled products by tackling the environmental damage caused by plastic pollution and a reliance on fossil fuels. [...] Avantium's plant plastic is designed to be resilient enough to contain carbonate drinks. Trials have shown that the plant plastic would decompose in one year using a composter, and a few years longer if left in normal outdoor conditions. But ideally, it should be recycled, said Van Aken. The bio-refinery plans to break down sustainable plant sugars into simple chemical structures that can then be rearranged to form a new plant-based plastic -- which could appear on supermarket shelves by 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are about to star in the biggest spaceflight event of the decade: launching on the inaugural flight of SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft. For years, they've anticipated this moment, picturing throngs of people lined up on Florida's beaches to watch them ascend into the sky. Now, their launch will likely look very different, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to grip the nation. That electric atmosphere they expected will mostly be absent for this monumental flight as NASA has urged spectators to watch the launch from home -- and it's what the two astronauts want, too.

Even though the atmosphere will be different, Hurley and Behnken, both longtime colleagues and friends, are still set to make history together when they board the Crew Dragon on May 27th. They'll be the first passengers that SpaceX has ever launched into space, and they'll also be the first people to launch to orbit from the United States since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. All of NASA's astronauts have had to fly on Russian rockets out of Kazakhstan for nearly the last decade. But thanks to a partnership with NASA, SpaceX is set to start launching the agency's astronauts from Florida once again with the Crew Dragon, beginning with Behnken and Hurley. "An invaluable part of their training is the fact that Behnken and Hurley have been good friends since they were first selected to be astronauts in 2000," adds The Verge. "In fact, they became so close that they were in each other's weddings when they each married fellow astronauts from that same class. They claim that their friendship provides a certain level of trust that only comes from years of knowing one another."

"We've worked together so long that there's a part of the training that we don't have to worry about," Behnken told The Verge last year, adding, "It is important for us. I already know what Doug's responses are going to be in a lot of different situations. I know if he's ahead or behind on whatever we're working on, in the same way that he knows that about me. That makes it a lot easier. Those aren't extra words I need to put into the communication. He can just glance at me and know what my status is."

Mass media routinely portray information about COVID-19 deaths on logarithmic graphs. But do their readers understand them? Alessandro Romano, Chiara Sotis, Goran Dominioni, and Sebastian Guidi carried out an experiment which suggests that they don't. From a report: The fact that the framing of information can dramatically alter how we react to it will hardly surprise any reader of this blog. Incidentally, the canonical example of framing effects involves an epidemic: a disease that kills 200 out of 600 people is considered worse than one in which 400 people survive. Whereas this imaginary epidemic was just a thought experiment, an actual global pandemic turns out to be an unfortunate laboratory for framing effects. In a recent experiment, we show how framing crucially affects people's responses to one of the most important building blocks of the COVID-19 informational puzzle: the number of deaths. We show that the logarithmic scale graphs that the media routinely use to display this information are poorly understood by the public and affect people's attitudes and policy preferences towards the pandemic. This finding has important implications because during a pandemic, even more than usually, the public depends on the media to convey understandable information in order to make informed decisions regarding health-protective behaviours.

Many media outlets portray information about the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths using a logarithmic scale graph. At first sight, this seems sensible. In fact, many of them defend their decision by showing how much better these charts are in conveying information about the exponential nature of the contagion. For history lovers, the popular economist Irving Fisher also believed this, which led him to strongly advocate for their use in 1917 (right before the Spanish Flu rendered them tragically relevant). Fisher was ecstatic about this scale: "When one is once accustomed to it, it never misleads." It turns out, however, that even specialized scientists don't get used to it. Not surprisingly, neither does the general public. We conducted a between-subjects experiment to test whether people had a better understanding of graphs in a logarithmic or in a linear scale, and whether the scale in which the chart is shown affects their level of worry and their policy preferences. Half of our n=2000 sample of US residents was shown the progression of COVID-19 related deaths in the US at the time of the survey plotted on a logarithmic scale. The other half received exactly the same information -- this time plotted on a good old linear scale. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: People who recover from COVID-19 but test positive for the virus again days or weeks later are not shedding viral particles and are not infectious, according to data released Tuesday by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The so-called "re-positive" cases have raised fears that an infection with the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, could "reactivate" in recovered patients or that recovering from the infection may fail to produce even short-lived immunity, allowing patients to immediately become re-infected if they are exposed. The new data from Korea should ease those concerns.

KCDC researchers examined 285 cases that had previously recovered from COVID-19 but then tested positive again. The patients tested positive again anywhere from one to 37 days after recovering from their first infection and being discharged from isolation. The average time to a second positive was about 14 days. Of those cases, researchers checked for symptoms in 284 of them. They found that 126 (about 48 percent) did indeed have symptoms related to COVID-19. But none of them seemed to have spread the infection. KCDC investigated 790 people who had close contact with the 285 cases and found that none of them had been infected by the "re-positive" cases. Crucially, additional testing of 108 "re-positive" cases found that none of them were shedding infectious virus.

FallOutBoyTonto shares a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, NASA announced that its chief of human spaceflight had resigned from the space agency. The timing of Doug Loverro's departure is terrible, with NASA's first launch of humans in nearly nine years due to occur in just eight days. The space agency offered a bland statement regarding Loverro's resignation as Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) at NASA.

"Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations Doug Loverro has resigned from his position effective Monday, May 18," the statement said. "Loverro hit the ground running this year and has made significant progress in his time at NASA. His leadership of HEO has moved us closer to accomplishing our goal of landing the first woman and the next man on the Moon in 2024. Loverro has dedicated more than four decades of his life in service to our country, and we thank him for his service and contributions to the agency." Loverro's resignation set off a firestorm of speculation after it was announced. He was due to chair a Flight Readiness Review meeting on Thursday to officially clear SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft for the first flight of humans to the International Space Station. The final go or no-go decision for that mission was to be his. That launch is presently scheduled for May 27.

According to CEO Kyle Wiens, teardown and repair website iFixit has just posted "the most comprehensive online resource for medical repair professionals." The Verge reports: The new database contains dedicated sections for clinical, laboratory, and medical support equipment, in addition to numerous other categories of devices. It also provides more than 13,000 manuals from hundreds of medical device manufacturers. Wiens says the effort began with a crowdsourcing campaign to collect repair information for hospital equipment, with a focus on "ventilator documentation, anesthesia systems, and respiratory analyzers -- devices widely used to support COVID-19 patients." But the effort grew from there, spanning more than two months as iFixit added dozens more staff members to the project; began talking to more biomedical technicians, doctors, and nurses about their day-to-day needs; and started collecting and cataloging information from libraries and other sources.

The medical repair database is split up into nine categories, with each containing countless subcategories for basically any type of device you'd find in a medical setting. For instance, the clinical equipment category contains 53 subcategories for everything from anesthesia systems and Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure (BiPAP) machines to respiratory analyzers and ventilators. The database also has medical training manuals, information on medical furniture like decontamination systems and hospital beds, and an exhaustive section on surgical equipment repair and maintenance. Wiens explains in iFixit's announcement post that some medical device manufacturers make this information more easily available online than others. "But for their day-to-day work, biomeds have long relied on a rag-tag set of web resources to get the job done. Among the most popular is Frank's Hospital Workshop, a Tanzania-based site that hosts hundreds of medical device manuals -- it's the unofficial biomed bible," Wiens writes. The goal was not to outdo that website or try to overtake it in popularity, but to add new documents and manuals that weren't available before to a database including existing resources. Another bonus: the website will not make money on this project. "We are providing hosting and curation free of charge, and free of advertising, to the medical community," Wiens says.

The mystery of some lava-like flows on Mars has been solved by scientists who say they are caused not by lava but by mud. Phys.Org reports: There are tens of thousands of these landforms on the Martian surface, often situated where there are massive channels scoured into the surface by ancient liquids flowing downstream. These channels are extremely long, extending many hundreds of kilometers in length and usually more than dozens of kilometers wide. They are believed to be the result of massive floods involving huge bodies of water comparable to the largest floods ever known to have occurred on Earth. When the water seeps into the subsurface it can emerge again as mud.

A European team of researchers has now simulated the movement of mud on the surface of Mars, with the results published in Nature Geoscience. [...] Using the Mars Chamber at the Open University, the scientists recreated the surface temperature and atmospheric pressure on Mars as part of a simulation of conditions on both Earth and Mars. The scientists performed experiments at low pressure and at extremely cold temperatures (-20C) to recreate the Martian environment. They found that free flowing mud under Martian conditions behaves differently from on Earth, because of rapid freezing and the formation of an icy crust. This is because water is not stable and begins to boil and evaporate. The evaporation removes latent heat from the mud, eventually causing it to freeze.

Under Martian conditions, the experimental mud flows formed similar shapes to "pahoehoe" lava frequently occurring on Hawaii or Iceland on Earth, which cools down to form smooth undulating surfaces. In the experiment, this happened when liquid mud spilled from ruptures in the frozen crust, then refroze. However, under terrestrial atmospheric pressure, the experimental mud flows did not form lava shapes, did not expand, and had no icy crust, even under very cold conditions.

hcs_$reboot writes: President Donald Trump said Monday that he has been taking anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for over a week to prevent coronavirus infection even though it is not yet a proven treatment. Hydroxychloroquine, which is available as a generic drug and is also produced under the brand name Plaquenil by French drugmaker Sanofi, can have serious side effects, including muscle weakness and heart arrhythmia. A small study in Brazil was halted for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking chloroquine, which hydroxychloroquine is derived from, developed arrhythmia, including some who died. Even Fox News agrees that this drug is harmful, adds hcs_$reboot. "I cannot stress this enough, this will kill you," Fox News host Neil Cavuto said.

Trump said Monday he asked his White House physician about the drug. "I asked him, 'What do you think?' He said, 'Well, if you'd like it.' I said, 'Yeah, I'd like it. I'd like to take it.'" Trump said Monday that if the drug wasn't good he'd "tell you." He said he's gotten "a lot of tremendously positive news on the hydroxy, and I say hey -- you know the expression I've used, John? What do you have to lose?"

"I'm not gonna get hurt by it. It's been around for 40 years," he said. "For malaria, for lupus, for other things. I take it. Front-line workers take it. A lot of doctors take it -- excuse me, a lot of doctors take it. I take it."

It may not be as hair-raising as Formula 1, nor as dramatic as Premier League football, but Sudoku solving is acquiring a niche following as a spectator sport. From a report: It's surprisingly thrilling, believe me. Just ask fans of the puzzle-solving YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic, which has seen its viewing figures shoot up over the last two months. Its top Sudoku video has had more than 3 million views. In daily challenges, the channel's two British hosts, puzzle wizards Simon Anthony and Mark Goodliffe, narrate their strategies and processes of deduction as they attempt to solve fiendishly difficult Sudokus. What makes the videos so joyous is the constant stream of 'aha!' moments, as well as the ingenuity of the sudokus presented.

Russian President Vladimir Putin once called Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, a "lone warrior." Putin was joking, but that description is starting to look more and more accurate. Russia has joined about 100 countries in backing a resolution at the upcoming World Health Assembly (WHA), calling for an independent inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The European Union-drafted resolution comes on the back of a push by Australia for an inquiry into China's initial handling of the crisis. That was met with an angry response from Beijing, which accused Canberra of a "highly irresponsible" move that could "disrupt international cooperation in fighting the pandemic and goes against people's shared aspiration." While the resolution to be presented at the annual meeting of World Health Organization (WHO) members, which begins on Monday in Geneva, does not single out China or any other country, it calls for an "impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation" of "the (WHO)-coordinated international health response to Covid-19."

The wording of the resolution is weak compared to Australia's previous calls for a probe into China's role and responsibility in the origin of the pandemic. This may have been necessary to get a majority of WHO member states to sign on -- particularly those, such as Russia, with traditionally strong ties to Beijing. But that doesn't mean China's government should rest easy. The potential for an independent probe, even one not initially tasked with investigating an individual country's response, to turn up damning or embarrassing information is great. Australian government sources told the ABC, the country's public broadcaster, that the resolution's language was sufficiently strong to "ensure that a proper and thorough investigation took place."

An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: Apple released its blueprint Sunday night for how it will reopen its retail stores once it is safe to due so, per official coronavirus health guidelines. It will also open 25 stores in the U.S. this week.

When a store reopens, customers will be required to submit to a temperature check and wear a mask before entering the store, according to the guidelines, written by Apple's retail and human resources boss Deirdre O'Brien. If a customer doesn't have a mask, Apple will provide them with one.

Apple also announced on Sunday several stores in the U.S. that will be reopening this week. Some of the stores will allow customers in, while others will only offer curbside pick-up service. Apple stores will be reopening this week in a handful of states including Florida, California (curbside service), Washington (curbside service), Hawaii, Oklahoma and Colorado. O'Brien said stores would reopen per local official guidelines, and could even close again if lockdown orders in a certain area have to be renacted.
Reuters notes Apple's move is "continuing a gradual process that has unlocked doors at nearly a fifth of its worldwide retail outlets." Around the world nearly 100 Apple stores have already done some form of re-opening, the guidelines state, adding that "In every store, we're focused on limiting occupancy and giving everybody lots of room, and renewing our focus on one-on-one, personalized service... Throughout the day, we're conducting enhanced deep cleanings that place special emphasis on all surfaces, display products, and highly trafficked areas..."

"Down the road, when we reflect on COVID-19, we should always remember how so many people around the world put the well-being of others at the center of their daily lives. At Apple, we plan to carry those values forward, and we will always put the health and safety of our customers and teams above all else."

Long-time Slashdot reader tomtermite shares a report from The Guardian: Ministers and officials from every nation will meet via video link on Monday for the annual world health assembly, which is expected to be dominated by efforts to stop rich countries monopolising drugs and future vaccines against Covid-19... The leaders of Italy, France, Germany and Norway, together with the European commission and council, called earlier this month for any innovative tools, therapeutics or vaccines to be shared equally and fairly.

"If we can develop a vaccine that is produced by the world, for the whole world, this will be a unique global public good of the 21st century," they said in a statement.

The sole resolution before the assembly this year is an EU proposal for a voluntary patent pool. Drug and vaccine companies would then be under pressure to give up the monopoly that patents allow them on their inventions, which means they can charge high prices, so that all countries can make or buy affordable versions. In the weeks of negotiations leading up to the meeting, which is scheduled to last for less than a day, there has been a dispute over the language of the resolution. Countries with major pharmaceutical companies argue they need patents to guarantee sufficiently high prices in wealthy nations to recoup their research and development costs....

Oxfam's health policy manager, Anna Marriott, said: "This week's letter calling for a people's vaccine, which was signed by more than 140 world leaders and experts, sets the bar for the scale of ambition we need to meet the challenge before us...." [Research charity] Wellcome published a poll on Sunday of 2,000 people in the UK which found 96% supported the idea that national governments should work together to ensure that treatments and vaccines can be manufactured in as many countries as possible and distributed globally to everyone who needs them.

"We need vaccines and treatments that will work for the world, and any advances must be available to all countries equally, without exception," said Alex Harris, the head of global policy at Wellcome.

sciencehabit writes: Radioactive fallout is rarely a good thing. But new research suggests charged particles emitted from Cold War-era nuclear tests may have boosted rainfall thousands of kilometers away from the testing sites, by triggering electrical charges in the air that caused water droplets to coalesce.

The United States, Soviet Union, and other nations often tested nuclear weapons above ground in the 1950s and early 1960s. The fallout contained a devil's cocktail of radioactive elements that can have subtle effects in the atmosphere. Charged particles emitted during radioactive decay can smack into surrounding atoms and molecules, ripping them asunder and creating even more charged particles. Then, that flurry of charged particles can glom onto dust, soot, or water droplets in the atmosphere, sometimes making the droplets hefty enough to fall to the ground as rain.

To see whether above-ground nuclear testing actually increased rainfall, University of Reading atmospheric scientist Giles Harrison and colleagues looked at Cold War-era rainfall records from a weather station on a remote island north of Scotland... The team's analysis suggests a strong link between fallout and precipitation from 1962 through 1964, a period when fallout from above-ground testing of nuclear weapons was commonly present in the stratosphere. At the Scottish site, clouds were thicker, and precipitation was 24% higher on days when above-average levels of fallout were present (as inferred from measurements of the atmosphere's electric field), the researchers report in Physical Review Letters.
The researchers believe it could help us understand weather patterns on planets like Jupiter and Neptune with charged partciles in their atmosphere -- and might even make it possible for small-scale experiments in controlling the weather.

Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: One of the less-reported stories of this pandemic is the myriad of ways in which COVID has exposed changes to the medical device market and the increasingly draconian software licensing practices that have made servicing and repairing medical devices much more difficult, slow and expensive. In its latest episode, Security Ledger Podcast goes behind the scenes of Project BioMed, an effort headed up by repair site iFixit to democratize access to repair and servicing information for medical devices including (and especially) ventilators and respirators.

Kylie Wiens, CEO of iFixit, talks about the critical role played by biomedical technicians, who keep hospital equipment up and running, and about the growing efforts by medical device OEMs to deny hospitals and biomeds access to the information they need to service equipment. The podcast also interviews Jonathan Krones, an Assistant Professor at Boston College and one of an army of volunteers, including hundreds of librarians and archivists who sorted through and cataloged hundreds of thousands of pages of medical device servicing information donated by biomedical technicians as part of the project.

Digital Trends reports: Bill Gates has been warning government leaders about a global pandemic for years, but the coronavirus still caught nations off guard — and the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder said that's one of his biggest regrets. "I wish I had done more to call attention to the danger," Gates told the Wall Street Journal. "I feel terrible. The whole point of talking about it was that we could take action and minimize the damage...."

[C]onvincing politicians to spend vast amounts of money on something that wasn't an immediate threat proved a difficult task, according to Gates.

He told the Wall Street Journal that he regrets not pushing harder.

"Is NASA really working on... a warp drive?" asks Popular Mechanics?

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares their report: An internal feasibility report suggests the agency might be, or at least that the idea of traveling through folded space is part of the NASA interstellar spaceflight menu. In the report, advanced propulsion physicist Harold "Sonny" White explains the ideas of theoretical physicist (and peer) Miguel Alcubierre. He then describes a "paradox" in Alcubierre's work, and how that paradox might be resolved to make a working model...

The colloquial term "warp drive" has come from science fiction, and it refers to the idea of sub-luminal (less than the speed of light) travel that conforms to Einstein's theory of general relativity, but still pushes speed to absolute maximum that's theoretically possible... In real life, light speed is the barrier... Alcubierre's theory dates to 1994, and physicists have used it as a jumping-off point for further discussion ever since. By creating a kind of pocket world where a spaceship can operate seemingly outside of physics [and using a huge amount of energy], the laws of physics can be sidestepped — or so the theory goes...

The NASA paper suggests a rolling start in order to guarantee a travel direction... He suggests the proving ground for warp speed could be, well, closer to home. "[T]he idea of a warp drive may have some fruitful domestic applications 'subliminally,' allowing it to be matured before it is engaged as a true interstellar drive system," he explains.

If scientists can make the so-called "negative mass" required for an Alcubierre drive, even a tiny example could be deployed within Earth's atmosphere.

A Slashdot reader quotes MIT News: To closely observe an interstellar object (ISO) hurtling through space, time is of the essence. Richard Linares, an assistant professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, developed a concept for a "dynamic orbital slingshot for rendezvous with interstellar objects." He outlined his idea in a research proposal that was recently selected as a Phase 1 study in the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, which "funds innovative aerospace concepts that could enable and transform future missions...."

Linares envisions deploying a constellation of statites, or "static satellites" enabled by a solar sail constructed with just the right mass-to-area ratio to act as interstellar watchdogs along the edges of our solar system, lying in wait until roused by an ISO crossing our threshold. Once detected, the solar sail then enables the statite to switch gears quickly and spring into action. Since the statite has a velocity of zero, it is already in position for efficient trajectory. Once released, the stored energy in the solar sail would leverage the gravitational pull of the sun to slingshot the statite in a freefall trajectory towards the ISO, allowing it to catch up. If the timing is right, the statite could tag the ISO with a CubeSat armed with onboard sensors to orbit the ISO over an extended period of time, gathering important scientific data.

New submitter AleRunner writes: Considering Vietnam's proximity to China, where coronavirus was first reported, it might be expected that the Southeast Asian country would be affected by Covid-19 in a similar manner," reports inews.co.uk. "China has more than 84,000 cases of coronavirus and more than 4,600 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Painting a strikingly different picture, Vietnam, which sits below its southern border, has just over 300 cases among its 97 million citizens and not a single death, according to reports."

The article points to a key willingness to "sacrifice short-term economic benefits for the health of the people" which is now paying back in that they plan to "partially resume international flights from June 1." The article then goes on to boost the value of Vietnam's "authoritarian leadership" and "socialist ethos," not mentioning the success of democratic and politically diverse countries like New Zealand, Slovenia, Taiwan and the Czech Republic. Still an interesting thought-provoking read. The report notes that Vietnam suspended flights to and from Wuhan after the first cases were detected. About a week later, the country closed its 870-mile border with China except for essential trade and travel.

"Vietnam quickly ramped up its testing and contact tracing capacity after the virus was initially detected in China, and has been expanding it since," the report adds. "Everyone entering from China was subject to testing and contact tracing." Interestingly, a nationwide lockdown was never implemented. Instead, it relied on testing labs, mass, centralized quarantine programs, and social distancing measures to contain the virus.

The Space Force, the newest military branch, now has an official flag. President Trump unveiled the flag at an Oval Office ceremony Friday where he also signed the 2020 Armed Forces Day Proclamation. NPR reports: The flag design comes from the seal of the Space Force, which was approved by the president in January. It sparked some Star Trek fan outrage for what some people have called its similarity to a logo in the science fiction franchise. According to the White House, the dark blue and white of the flag is meant to represent the "vast recesses of outer space" and includes a elliptical orbit with three large stars meant to symbolize the branch's purpose: "organizing, training and equipping" Space Force troopers, in the language of the Pentagon. The Space Force was created in part to protect strategic American space infrastructure, including communications, navigation and spy satellites, from adversaries such as Russia and China.

"As you know, China, Russia, perhaps others, started off a lot sooner than us," Trump said. "We should have started this a long time ago, but we've made up for it in spades. We have developed some of the most incredible weapons anyone's ever seen. And it's moving along very rapidly." Trump teased what he called a new weapon that could attack at such a high speed it would overwhelm an enemy's defenses. "We have, I call it the 'super-duper missile.' And I heard the other night [it's] 17 times faster than what they have right now," Trump said. It wasn't immediately clear what missile the president was describing, but the U.S. and other advanced powers are known to be developing new hypersonic weapons, designed to race at many times the speed of sound.