turp182 writes: What's your story? How are you doing? What do you predict? Below is a summary of the stats I've been following, some assumptions, and an overview of my personal situation. Anyway, how you all doing?

Controversial trials in which volunteers are intentionally infected with Covid-19 could accelerate vaccine development, according to the World Health Organization, which has released new guidance on how the approach could be ethically justified despite the potential dangers for participants. From a report: So-called challenge trials are a mainstream approach in vaccine development and have been used in malaria, typhoid and flu, but there are treatments available for these diseases if a volunteer becomes severely ill. For Covid-19, a safe dose of the virus has not been established and there are no failsafe treatments if things go wrong. Scientists, however, increasingly agree that such trials should be considered, and the WHO is the latest body to indicate conditional support for the idea. "There's this emerging consensus among everyone who has thought about this seriously," said Prof Nir Eyal, the director of Rutgers University's Center for Population-Level Bioethics in the US.

Researchers have collected some of the highest resolution images of Jupiter ever obtained from earth -- by combining images from Hawaii's Gemini North telescope with images from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Juno probe (currently orbiting Jupiter).

The images -- assembled from three years of observations -- "confirm that dark spots in the famous Great Red Spot are actually gaps in the cloud cover and not due to cloud color variations," explains an announcement from the Gemini Observatory. Gemini North's Near Infrared Imager (NIRI) allows astronomers to peer deep into Jupiter's mighty storms, since the longer wavelength infrared light can pass through the thin haze but is obscured by thicker clouds high in Jupiter's atmosphere. This creates a "jack-o-lantern"-like effect in the images where the warm, deep layers of Jupiter's atmosphere glow through gaps in the planet's thick cloud cover... A large number of very short exposure images are obtained and only the sharpest images, when the Earth's atmosphere is briefly stable, are used...

The ultra-sharp Gemini infrared images complement optical and ultraviolet observations by Hubble and radio observations by the Juno spacecraft to reveal new secrets about the giant planet... The detailed, multiwavelength imaging of Jupiter by Gemini and Hubble has, over the past three years, proven crucial to contextualizing the observations by the Juno orbiter, and to understanding Jupiter's wind patterns, atmospheric waves, and cyclones. The two telescopes, together with Juno, can observe Jupiter's atmosphere as a system of winds, gases, heat, and weather phenomena, providing coverage and insight much like the network of weather satellites meteorologists use to observe Earth.
The resolution was so high, the astronomer leading the observations says their telescope "could resolve the two headlights of a car in Miami, seen from New York City."

An anonymous reader writes: You really can't make this stuff up, but Americans across the country, out of fear of "murder hornets," have begun killing all kinds of bees en masse. According to Doug Yanega, senior museum scientist for the Department of Entomology at UC Riverside, a national panic has led to the needless slaughter of native wasps and bees, beneficial insects whose populations are already threatened...

"Folks in China, Korea and Japan have lived side by side with these hornets for hundreds of years, and it has not caused the collapse of human society there. My colleagues in Japan, China and Korea are just rolling their eyes in disbelief at what kind of snowflakes we are..."

"I don't want to downplay this — they are logistically dangerous insects. But having people in Tennessee worry about this is just ridiculous. The only people who should be bothering experts with concerns about wasp IDs are living in the northwest quadrant of Washington (state). And really, right now, nobody else in the country should even be thinking about this stuff," he continued.
"The facts are, experts said, two dead hornets were found in Washington last December, a lone Canadian live nest was found and wiped out last September and no live hornets have yet been seen this year," reports the Associated Press.

And when they spoke to the Washington Agriculture Department entomologist working on the state's response, he issued an additional correction for all the journalists covering this story. "They are not 'murder hornets.' "They are just hornets."

"France is integrating new AI tools into security cameras in the Paris metro system to check whether passengers are wearing face masks," reports the Verge: The software, which has already been deployed elsewhere in the country, began a three-month trial in the central Chatelet-Les Halles station of Paris this week, reports Bloomberg. [Alternate source] French startup DatakaLab, which created the program, says the goal is not to identify or punish individuals who don't wear masks, but to generate anonymous statistical data that will help authorities anticipate future outbreaks of COVID-19... "The goal is just to publish statistics of how many people are wearing masks every day."

The pilot is one of a number of measures cities around the world are introducing as they begin to ease lockdown measures and allow people to return to work. Although France, like the US, initially discouraged citizens from wearing masks, the country has now made them mandatory on public transport. It's even considering introducing fines of €135 ($145) for anyone found not wearing a mask on the subway, trains, buses, or taxis....

The software is lightweight enough to work on location wherever installed, meaning no data is ever sent to the cloud or to DatakaLab's offices. Instead, the software generates statistics about how many individuals are seen wearing masks in 15-minute intervals. The company has already integrated the software into buses in the French city of Cannes in the south of the country. It added small CPUs to existing CCTV cameras installed in buses, which process the video in real time. When the bus returns to the depot at night, it connects to Wi-Fi and sends the data on to the local transport authorities.

The newly-created U.S. Space Force has released its first recruitment video, CNET reports: In a video posted Wednesday to Twitter showing rockets, mission control-types rooms and U.S. Space Force members in spacesuits, a voice-over says, "maybe your purpose on this planet isn't on this planet." Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said during a livestream Wednesday that so far recruitment hasn't been a problem for the Space Force. "There's been an avalanche of applicants." This sixth branch of the US military was established in December 2019 and will be operational by mid-2021.
CNET notes the video appeared "a day after Netflix dropped a trailer for its upcoming comedy Space Force. And the leader of the U.S. Space Force says he's looking forward to the Netflix comedy co-created by Steve Carell.

"The one piece of advice I'd give to Steve Carell is to get a haircut," Gen. Jay Raymond, the U.S. Space Force Chief of Space Operations, said Wednesday during a webinar hosted by the nonprofit Space Foundation. Raymond is bald, and joked that Steve Carell is "looking a little too shaggy if he wants to play the Space Force chief."

Saturday Elon Musk announced he'd "immediately" relocate Tesla's headquarters and "future programs" to Texas and Nevada, reports Ars Technica.

While California lifted its restrictions on manufacturers and businesses, the county of Alameda (where Tesla is located) says the company's manufacturing plant does not yet meet the county's requirements for safely reopening. "Frankly, this is the final straw," Musk tweeted. Musk also announced his intent to file a lawsuit against Alameda County officials "immediately," adding, "The unelected & ignorant 'Interim Health Officer' of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!" Musk also encouraged Tesla shareholders to file a class-action suit against the county.

The latest back-and-forth between Tesla and Alameda County officials began on Thursday, when a memo sent to Tesla employees indicated that its Fremont plant would reopen "at 30% our normal headcount per shift," as reported by TechCrunch. Alameda officials responded on Friday with a firm reminder that the county's stay-in-place order would remain in effect for Tesla, and all other "non-essential" operations in the county, until May 31, with the exception of "basic" operations...

"We have informed Tesla of all of the conditions that must exist for phasing in the safe reopening of various sectors of the economy and the community. Tesla has been informed that they do not meet those criteria and must not reopen. We welcome Tesla's proactive work on a reopening plan so that once they fit the criteria to reopen, they can do so in a way that protects their employees and the community at large."

Long-time Slashdot reader blackbearnh writes: Since the COVID-19 pandemic has made Personal Protective Equipment worth it's weight in gold, Makers have been trying to help bridge the gap. While sewn masks have been the most common solution, the 3D printing community has been pitching in as well. The Montana Mask has been one of the most popular designs...

Thursday, the group Make the Masks announced that the design files and STLs to print the mask have been released under the GNU General Public License v3, allowing anyone to print, sell, remix or improve the design, as long as they conform to the license. Importantly, the GPLv3 includes an international non-exclusive patent grant, meaning that even if the inventors decide to apply for a patent, it will not restrict anyone from using the design.

A new hydroxychloroquine study -- "the largest to date" -- was published Thursday in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded that Covid-19 patients taking the drug "do not fare better than those not receiving the drug," reports Time: Dr. Neil Schluger, chief of the division of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine at Columbia, and his team studied more than 1,300 patients admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia University Irving Medical Center for COVID-19. Some received hydroxychloroquine on an off-label basis, a practice that allows doctors to prescribe a drug that has been approved for one disease to treat another — in this case, COVID-19. About 60% of the patients received hydroxychloroquine for about five days.

They did not show any lower rate of needing ventilators or a lower risk of dying during the study period compared to people not getting the drug.

"We don't think at this point, given the totality of evidence, that it is reasonable to routinely give this drug to patients," says Schluger. "We don't see the rationale for doing that." While the study did not randomly assign people to receive the drug or placebo and compare their outcomes, the large number of patients involved suggests the findings are solid. Based on the results, Schluger says doctors at his hospital have already changed their advice about using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. "Our guidance early on had suggested giving hydroxychloroquine to hospitalized patients, and we updated that guidance to remove that suggestion," he says.
In another study conducted at U.S. veterans hospitals where severely ill patients were given hydroxychloroquine, "the drug was found to be of no use against the disease and potentially harmful when given in high doses," reports the Chicago Tribune.

They also report that to firmly establish whether the drug has any effect, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is now funding a randomized, controlled trial at six medical institutions of hundreds of people who've tested positive for Covid-19.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Crawling along the world's river bottoms, the larvae of the caddis fly suffer a perpetual housing crisis. To protect themselves from predators, they gather up sand grains and other sediment and paste them all together with silk, forming a cone that holds their worm-like bodies. As they mature and elongate, they have to continuously add material to the case -- think of it like adding rooms to your home for the rest of your life, or at least until you turn into an adult insect. If the caddis fly larva somehow loses its case, it's got to start from scratch, and that's quite the precarious situation for a defenseless tube of flesh. And now, the microplastic menace is piling onto the caddis fly's list of tribulations.

Microplastic particles -- pieces of plastic under 5 millimeters long -- have already corrupted many of Earth's environments, including the formerly pristine Arctic and deep-sea sediments. In a study published last year, researchers in Germany reported finding microplastic particles in the cases of caddis flies in the wild. Then, last month, they published the troubling results of lab experiments that found the more microplastic particles a caddis fly larva incorporates into its case, the weaker that structure becomes. That could open up caddis flies to greater predation, sending ripple effects through river ecosystems. In the lab, the researchers found that the larvae chose to use two kinds of microplastics to build their cases, likely because the plastic is lighter than the sand, so it's not as hard to lift. The problem is that the cases with more plastic and less sand collapse more easily, weakening the larvae's protection from predatory fish, among other things.

A more long-term concern is bioaccumulation. "A small fish eats a larva, a bigger fish eats the smaller fish, all the way on up, and the concentrations of microplastic and associated toxins accumulate over time," the report says. "The bigger predators that people eat, like tuna, may be absorbing those microplastics and the chemicals they leach."

The study has been published in the journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

SpaceX's newest Starship prototype has fired its engine for the first time, potentially paving the way for a test flight in the very near future. Space.com reports: The SN4, the latest test version of SpaceX's Mars-colonizing Starship vehicle, aced a "static fire" Tuesday night (May 5), lighting up its single Raptor engine briefly while remaining on the ground at the company's South Texas facilities. "Starship SN4 passed static fire," SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via Twitter late on Tuesday. [You can see video of the static fire here.] With the static fire in the rearview mirror, SpaceX can begin prepping the SN4 for its next big moment: an uncrewed test flight, which Musk has said will take the vehicle to a target altitude of about 500 feet (150 meters).

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued an emergency use authorization for the first at-home Covid-19 test that uses saliva samples, the agency said in a news release. Rutgers University's RUCDR Infinite Biologics lab received an amended emergency authorization late Thursday. With the test, people can collect their own saliva at home and send their saliva samples to a lab for results...

"Authorizing additional diagnostic tests with the option of at-home sample collection will continue to increase patient access to testing for COVID-19. This provides an additional option for the easy, safe and convenient collection of samples required for testing without traveling to a doctor's office, hospital or testing site," FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen M. Hahn said in the FDA's press release on Friday...

The test remains prescription only.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: As hospitals were overrun by coronavirus patients in other parts of the world, the Army Corps of Engineers mobilized in the U.S., hiring private contractors to build emergency field hospitals around the country. The endeavor cost more than $660 million, according to an NPR analysis of federal spending records. But nearly four months into the pandemic, most of these facilities haven't treated a single patient. Public health experts said this episode exposes how ill-prepared the U.S. is for a pandemic. They praised the Army Corps for quickly providing thousands of extra beds, but experts said there wasn't enough planning to make sure these field hospitals could be put to use once they were finished. "It's so painful because what it's showing is that the plans we have in place, they don't work," said Robyn Gershon, a professor at New York University's School of Global Public Health. "We have to go back to the drawing board and redo it."

But the nation's governors -- who requested the Army Corps projects and, in some cases, contributed state funding -- said they're relieved these facilities didn't get more use. They said early models predicted a catastrophic shortage of hospital beds, and no one knew for sure when or if stay-at-home orders would reduce the spread of the coronavirus. "All those field hospitals and available beds sit empty today," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said last month. "And that's a very, very good thing." Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said: "These 1,000-bed alternate care sites are not necessary; they're not filled. Thank God." Senior military leaders also said the effort was a success -- even if the beds sit empty.

In some states and major cities, it's now mandatory to wear a mask in public to prevent the spread of COVID-19. That mask could be anything from a handkerchief to a designer cotton mask to a full-blown N95 respirator, so long as you have something between your mouth and nose and the world around you. But in California's Bay Area, there's a new stipulation: You can wear any style of mask you want, so long as it doesn't have a valve in it. What? Why? Because a mask with a valve may protect you from some pathogens in the air, but it doesn't protect the people around you from your own breath.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The new coronavirus can persist in men's semen even after they have begun to recover, a finding that raises the possibility the virus could be sexually transmitted, Chinese researchers said Thursday. A team at Shangqiu Municipal Hospital tested 38 male patients treated there at the height of the pandemic in China, in January and February. About 16% of them had evidence of the coronavirus in their semen, the team reported in the journal JAMA Network Open. About a quarter of them were in the acute stage of infection and nearly 9% of them were recovering, the team reported. It's not a surprising finding. Many viruses can live in the male reproductive tract. Ebola and Zika virus were both found to spread in semen, sometimes months after a male patient had recovered. It's not yet clear if coronavirus can spread this way. Finding evidence of virus does not necessarily mean it's infectious.

Rick Schumann shares a report from Live Science: Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a Seattle nonprofit dedicated to neuroscience, have been painstakingly recording every brain cell and every connection between those neurons in mice for the past several years. The result represents major progress since an earlier, simpler map they released in 2016. The now-complete map encompasses about 100 million cells, the institute reported in a paper published today (May 7) in the journal Cell.

Typically, researchers trace connections between brain cells using thin slices of tissue that can be imaged and explored layer by layer. To build a comprehensive, three-dimensional map, the Allen Institute team instead broke the mouse brain into "voxels" -- 3D pixels -- and then mapped the cells and connections within each voxel. The result comprises an "average" of the brains of 1,675 laboratory mice, to make sure the map was as standard as possible. [...] Mice are common "model organisms" in neuroscience. Their brains have fairly similar structures to humans', they can be trained, they breed easily, and researchers have already developed robust understandings of how their brains work. The hope is that the map will bring that understanding to a new level, the Allen Institute said. In doing so, neuroscientists will have a tool with which to develop new research programs and accelerate research already underway.

"Over at ScienceDirect, they report on a French 'retrospective' study of just over 1,000 patients across all age groups with very good results," writes long-time Slashdot reader kenh. The analysis found that administration of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Azithromycin (AZ) before COVID-19 complications occur "is safe and associated with very low fatality rate in patients." From the report: Background: In France, the combination hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and azithromycin (AZ) is used in the treatment of COVID-19.

Methods: We retrospectively report on 1061 SARS-CoV-2 positive tested patients treated with HCQ (200 mg three times daily for ten days) + AZ (500 mg on day 1 followed by 250 mg daily for the next four days) for at least three days. Outcomes were death, clinical worsening (transfer to ICU, and more than 10 day hospitalization) and viral shedding persistence (more than 10 days).

Results: A total of 1061 patients were included in this analysis (46.4% male, mean age 43.6 years -- range 14-95 years). Good clinical outcome and virological cure were obtained in 973 patients within 10 days (91.7%). Prolonged viral carriage was observed in 47 patients (4.4%) and was associated to a higher viral load at diagnosis (pA poor clinical outcome (PClinO) was observed for 46 patients (4.3%) and 8 died (0.75%) (74-95 years old). All deaths resulted from respiratory failure and not from cardiac toxicity. Five patients are still hospitalized (98.7% of patients cured so far). PClinO was associated with older age (OR 1.11), severity at admission (OR 10.05) and low HCQ serum concentration. PClinO was independently associated with the use of selective beta-blocking agents and angiotensin II receptor blockers (p less than .05). A total of 2.3% of patients reported mild adverse events (gastrointestinal or skin symptoms, headache, insomnia and transient blurred vision). On the contrary, a separate study, which has not been peer-reviewed, found the two primary outcomes for COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were death and the need for mechanical ventilation.

"The study analyzed only 368 patients but represented the largest look at the outcomes of COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine -- with or without azithromycin, a common antibiotic -- anywhere in the world," The Hill reported more than two weeks ago.

UPDATE (5/9/2020): A new hydroxychloroquine study -- "the largest to date" -- was published Thursday in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. It concluded that Covid-19 patients taking the drug don't do any better than those not receiving the drug.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: As President Trump rushes to reopen the economy, a battle has erupted between the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the agency's detailed guidelines to help schools, restaurants, churches and other establishments safely reopen. A copy of the C.D.C. guidance obtained by The New York Times includes sections for child care programs, schools and day camps, churches and other "communities of faith," employers with vulnerable workers, restaurants and bars, and mass transit administrators. The recommendations include using disposable dishes and utensils at restaurants, closing every other row of seats in buses and subways while restricting transit routes between areas experiencing different coronavirus infection levels, and separating children at school and camps into groups that should not mix throughout the day.

But White House and other administration officials rejected the recommendations over concerns that they were overly prescriptive, infringed on religious rights and risked further damaging an economy that Mr. Trump was banking on to recover quickly. A spokesman for the C.D.C. said the guidance was still under discussion with the White House and a revised version could be published soon. [...] The mixed signals extend to reopening guidelines: On April 16, Mr. Trump's coronavirus task force released broad guidance for states to reopen in three phases, based on case levels and hospital capacity. But the more detailed C.D.C. guidance was seen by some members of the task force and other aides as a document that could slow down the reopening effort, according to several people with knowledge of the deliberations inside the West Wing. "Protections against religious discrimination aren't suspended during an emergency. This means the federal government cannot single out religious conduct as somehow being more dangerous or worthy of scrutiny than comparable secular behavior," said Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services and a social conservative who once headed the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation. "Governments have a duty to instruct the public on how to stay safe during this crisis and can absolutely do so without dictating to people how they should worship God."

Several federal agencies that reviewed the guidance in draft form, including the Department of Labor and the Office for Civil Rights at H.H.S., protested, saying it would be harmful to businesses and the economy and too burdensome for houses of worship.

According to research published in the journal AIP Advances, scientists have created a prototype jet engine that compresses air and ionizes it with microwaves, generating plasma that thrusts it forward. ScienceAlert reports: There's a long way to go between a proof-of-concept prototype and installing an engine in a real plane. But the prototype was able to launch a one-kilogram (2.2-pound) steel ball 24 millimeters (almost one inch) into the air. That's the same thrust, proportional to scale, as a conventional jet engine. "Our results demonstrated that such a jet engine based on microwave air plasma can be a potentially viable alternative to the conventional fossil fuel jet engine," lead researcher and Wuhan University engineer Jau Tang said in a press release.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Mini-brains grown in a dish rapidly develop signs of Alzheimer's disease when infected with the common herpes virus that causes cold sores. The finding adds to growing evidence that some cases of Alzheimer's disease are triggered by viruses and could potentially be treated with antiviral drugs. To understand how Herpes simplex virus-1 (HSV-1) might cause Alzheimer's disease, Dana Cairns at Tufts University in the U.S., and her colleagues added the virus to clumps of brain tissue grown in dishes. They made the mini-brains by filling donut-shaped scaffolds with human stem cells that were then coaxed into forming brain cells.

Within three days of being infected with HSV-1, the mini-brains developed large beta-amyloid plaques reminiscent of those found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. They also showed other signs of the condition, such as inflammation and loss of brain cells. In contrast, when the mini-brains were treated with valacyclovir -- a commonly-used herpes drug -- they seemed to be protected against HSV-1 damage. This finding lends support to a clinical trial that is currently underway in the U.S. testing whether valacyclovir helps to treat Alzheimer's disease in people who also have HSV-1, says Cairns. One unresolved question is why HSV-1 -- which is found in about two thirds of people under 50 -- seems to invade the brains of some people but not others. People with weaker blood-brain barriers due to age or genetic factors may be more at risk, says Cairns. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.