The massive cosmic object lurks in a star system you can see with the naked eye. From a report: During winter in the Southern Hemisphere, a blue point of light in the constellation Telescopium gleams overhead. The brilliant pinprick on the sky, which looks like a bright star, is actually two stars in close orbit -- accompanied by the closest known black hole to Earth. The newly discovered black hole is about 1,011 light-years from our solar system in the star system HR 6819. Unveiled today in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the invisible object is locked in an orbit with two visible stars. It's estimated to be about four times the mass of the sun and roughly 2,500 light-years closer than the next black hole.

"It seems like it's been hiding in plain sight," says astronomer Kareem El-Badry, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in binary star systems but wasn't involved with the study. "It's a bright enough star [system] that people have been studying it since the 80s, but it seems like it's had some surprises." On a human scale, a thousand light-years is an immense distance. If a model of the Milky Way were scaled so that Earth and the sun were only a hair's width apart, HR 6819 would be about four miles away. But in the grand scheme of the galaxy, which is more than 100,000 light-years across, HR 6819 is quite close, and it suggests the Milky Way is littered with black holes. "If you find one that is very close to you, and you assume you're not special, then they must be out there everywhere," says lead study author Thomas Rivinius, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.

The Trump administration is drafting a legal blueprint for mining on the moon under a new U.S.-sponsored international agreement called the Artemis Accords, Reuters reported Wednesday. From the report: The agreement would be the latest effort to cultivate allies around NASA's plan to put humans and space stations on the moon within the next decade, and comes as the civilian space agency plays a growing role in implementing American foreign policy. The draft pact has not been formally shared with U.S. allies yet.

The Trump administration and other spacefaring countries see the moon as a key strategic asset in outer space. The moon also has value for long-term scientific research that could enable future missions to Mars -- activities that fall under a regime of international space law widely viewed as outdated. The Artemis Accords, named after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's new Artemis moon programme, propose "safety zones" that would surround future moon bases to prevent damage or interference from rival countries or companies operating in close proximity.

In just a month, Tanzania went from having only 20 coronavirus cases recorded to 480 cases, an alarming increase which puts the country with the highest number of cases in East Africa. However, the country's president John Magufuli is convinced the number may be exaggerated due to technical hiccups with the imported testing kits. From a report: Magufuli, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, said the testers had randomly obtained several non-human samples on animals and fruits which included a sheep, a goat and a pawpaw and the results came out positive. The samples were given human names and ages and were submitted to the country's National Referral Laboratory to test for coronavirus without the lab technicians knowing the true identity of the samples. This apparently prompted Magufuli to believe some people who were tested positive for Covid-19 might not have contracted the novel virus after all.

"I have always raised my suspicions about how our national lab has been conducting the Covid-19 cases," he said at an event in Chato in northern-western Tanzania. The president, who has ordered a probe into the country's testing protocols, insinuated possible interference by unnamed saboteurs. But Tanzania has long been criticized by public health experts for enabling a more relaxed approach to the pandemic compared to the strict lockdowns and restrictions in neighboring East African countries. Instead Magufuli has asked Tanzanians to pray away the virus and left places of worship open since the Covid-19 outbreak began.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Public trust in the work of scientists and health experts has grown during the coronavirus pandemic, amid a surge in misinformation about the virus, a poll has found. The opinion poll by the Open Knowledge Foundation, an open data campaign group, found 64% of voters were now more likely to listen to expert advice from scientists and researchers, with only 5% saying they were less likely to do so. The Survation poll also found 51% of the population had seen fake news about the coronavirus, including discredited claims that Covid-19 was linked to 5G mobile phone masts, on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

A majority of voters, 59%, also trusted the government to make the right decisions about using confidential data to decide when to lift the lockdown and change social distancing rules. However, 35% of voters said they did not trust the government, with only 6% unsure. The public also wanted much greater access to scientific data, and disliked restrictions on their right to get information. Survation found that 67% of voters believe that all research findings in the search for a Covid-19 vaccine should be made freely available. In addition, 97% of the 1,006 voters polled said government and health bodies should release non-confidential data used by ministers and the NHS to inform their policies, and 95% said that data should always be openly available, on principle.

Researchers from Rice University have created an efficient, low-cost device that splits water to produce hydrogen fuel. "The platform developed by the Brown School of Engineering lab of Rice materials scientist Jun Lou integrates catalytic electrodes and perovskite solar cells that, when triggered by sunlight, produce electricity," reports Phys.Org. "The current flows to the catalysts that turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a sunlight-to-hydrogen efficiency as high as 6.7%." From the report: This sort of catalysis isn't new, but the lab packaged a perovskite layer and the electrodes into a single module that, when dropped into water and placed in sunlight, produces hydrogen with no further input. The platform introduced by Lou, lead author and Rice postdoctoral fellow Jia Liang and their colleagues in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano is a self-sustaining producer of fuel that, they say, should be simple to produce in bulk.

"The concept is broadly similar to an artificial leaf," Lou said. "What we have is an integrated module that turns sunlight into electricity that drives an electrochemical reaction. It utilizes water and sunlight to get chemical fuels." Perovskites are crystals with cubelike lattices that are known to harvest light. The most efficient perovskite solar cells produced so far achieve an efficiency above 25%, but the materials are expensive and tend to be stressed by light, humidity and heat. "Jia has replaced the more expensive components, like platinum, in perovskite solar cells with alternatives like carbon," Lou said. "That lowers the entry barrier for commercial adoption. Integrated devices like this are promising because they create a system that is sustainable. This does not require any external power to keep the module running." The research has been published in the journal ACS Nano.

The U.K. surpassed Italy on Tuesday to report the most coronavirus deaths in Europe, according to Johns Hopkins data and its own tracker. Axios reports: The country, which prolonged its lockdown last month until at least the second week of May, has reported more than 196,000 cases compared to Italy's roughly 213,000. Imperial College London is undertaking the randomized testing of 100,000 people in England this week to gain data on when the lockdown might be able to lift, per The Guardian. "Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Tuesday that 29,427 people have died with Covid-19 since the outbreak began, more than in Italy and lower only than the United States," adds CNN. "The official figure includes 693 new deaths in the most recent 24-hour period, up to 5 p.m. (12 p.m. ET) Monday."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: No two airlines are handling the uncertain future in quite the same way. Frontier Airlines, though, is going all in on the industry's worst nickel-and-diming impulses and is happy to let you gain a few precious inches of space from your neighbor and their bodily fluids -- for an additional fee. Frontier touts the new charge as the "more room" pledge. "While we believe the best measure to keep everyone healthy is to require face coverings, for those who want an empty seat next to them for extra peace of mind or simply additional comfort, we are now offering 'More Room,'" Frontier CEO Barry Biffle said in a written statement.

The extra fee for a guaranteed empty middle seat will be between $39 and $89, depending on the route. It will be in effect starting this Friday and run at least through the end of August, if not later. Frontier is also requiring face coverings for all passengers in the gate area as well as aboard aircraft, and it will be implementing mandatory hand-washing and health screenings before boarding. Every other major U.S. airline is also mandating face coverings for passengers, but none of them is as yet charging passengers for trying to avoid being breathed on.

Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From a report: The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, the scientists wrote. In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease, the report warned. The 33-page report was posted Thursday on BioRxiv, a website that researchers use to share their work before it is peer reviewed, an effort to speed up collaborations with scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines or treatments. That research has been largely based on the genetic sequence of earlier strains and might not be effective against the new one.

The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report's authors said they felt an "urgent need for an early warning" so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain. Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China, and within weeks it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report. The new strain's dominance over its predecessors demonstrates that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is not yet known.

Mike Fleming Jr., reporting for Deadline: I'm hearing that Tom Cruise and Elon Musk's Space X are working on a project with NASA that would be the first narrative feature film -- an action adventure -- to be shot in outer space. It's not a Mission: Impossible film and no studio is in the mix at this stage but look for more news as I get it. But this is real, albeit in the early stages of liftoff.

Shashank Bengali, reporting for Los Angeles Times: By his second day in the hospital with COVID-19, Charles Pignal's mild cough and 102-degree fever had disappeared. Bored and "bouncing off the walls" of his room in the isolation ward at Singapore's National Center for Infectious Diseases, he felt like he could go out and play a set of tennis. The 42-year-old footwear executive told his mother on the phone, "I'll be out of here in a couple of days." But Pignal would test positive for the coronavirus for five more weeks, despite developing no further symptoms. He wasn't released until the 40th day after he first fell ill, when he finally tested negative two days in a row. Cases like his are coming under increasing scrutiny as medical researchers worldwide puzzle over why the coronavirus -- which typically lasts about two to three weeks in the body -- appears to endure longer in some patients, even relatively young, healthy ones.

With studies showing that asymptomatic patients can transmit the SARS-CoV-2 virus, understanding how the virus leaves the body is among the most urgent mysteries facing researchers as governments in the United States and across the world begin to reopen their economies. Although studies show that the average recovery time from COVID-19 is two weeks, and nearly all patients are virus-free within a month, "less than 1% to 2%, for reasons that we do not know, continue to shed virus after that," said Hsu Li Yang, a physician specializing in infectious diseases at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore. In recent weeks, China and South Korea have reported that some patients who had recovered from COVID-19 tested positive again in follow-up visits. In extreme cases, patients in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began late last year, reportedly tested positive 70 days after recovery. Doctors in both countries said they didn't believe the patients had been reinfected, a worrisome possibility because of its implications for building widespread immunity to a disease for which there is no vaccine. They also had no evidence that the patients had infected others.

Scientists created a monoclonal antibody that can defeat the new coronavirus in the lab, an early but promising step in efforts to find treatments and curb the pandemic's spread. From a report: The experimental antibody has neutralized the virus in cell cultures. While that's early in the drug development process -- before animal research and human trials -- the antibody may help prevent or treat Covid-19 and related diseases in the future, either alone or in a drug combination, according to a study [PDF] published Monday in the journal Nature Communications. More research is needed to see whether the findings are confirmed in a clinical setting and how precisely the antibody defeats the virus, Berend-Jan Bosch of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues wrote in the paper. The antibody known as 47D11 targets the spike protein that gives the new coronavirus a crown-like shape and lets it enter human cells. In the Utrecht experiments, it didn't just defeat the virus responsible for Covid-19 but also a cousin equipped with similar spike proteins, which causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

America's Environmental Protection Agency "granted permission for genetically engineered mosquitoes to be released into the Florida Keys and around Houston to see if they can help limit the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses," writes Bloomberg Environment.

clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684) shared their report on ab experimental use permit granted to British biotech company Oxitec Ltd: Oxitec's first field trial in Brazil achieved up to a 96% suppression of target disease transmitting mosquito populations in dense urban settings, the company said. But in public comments on the permit approval docket, Jaydee Hanson, policy director at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Food Safety, questioned Oxitec's claims and warned of other possible dangers.

"Most (but not all) of the GE mosquitoes' offspring die at the late larval stage, in the water where the female mosquitoes lay their eggs," Hanson wrote."This partial survival rate, even if low (a reported 3 to 4% in laboratory conditions), would lead to the establishment of hybrid mosquitoes in the environment, which might possess altered properties, including the potential for enhanced disease transmission or resistance to insecticides," Hanson said.
The U.S. agency said it "looks forward to receiving field test results regarding the effectiveness of this promising new tool that could help combat the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like the Zika virus."

Global health officials and diplomats are "alarmed" by America's "apparent lack of interest in cooperation" on international efforts for a vaccine against Covid-19. Slashdot reader Charlotte Web quotes this report from Politico: The fear is that Trump will be content with allowing the race to develop and distribute the vaccine to devolve into a global contest -- and that poorer countries will be left behind in the rush to procure doses. In essence: that the president's "America First" view of world affairs as an atavistic scramble for power will lead to unnecessary suffering and death. "The worst situation would be, if when these tools are available, they go to the highest bidder -- that would be terrible for the world," said Melinda Gates, who, along with her tech entrepreneur husband, Bill, leads a powerful foundation that has devoted billions to health research. "Covid-19 anywhere is Covid-19 everywhere. And that's why it's got to take global cooperation."

The ongoing global scramble for masks, gloves and other personal protective gear offers a harrowing and potentially instructive example. Now imagine, officials and experts say, a similar competition to obtain vaccine doses: It could drag out the health crisis by letting the virus spread for longer than it otherwise might, devastating the very countries least equipped to fight it... It's not just the U.S. that has put the needs of its own citizens first. Dozens of countries, including the U.S. and some in Europe, have imposed travel restrictions as well as limits on the exports of masks and other critical medical equipment. Global health leaders are trying to avoid a repeat of such nationalist tactics when it comes to vaccines and other types of medicines that could combat Covid-19.
"Health officials and analysts caution that it's too early to go into full-fledged panic about a looming global vaccine fistfight," the article notes.

But it also points out that "There's no binding treaty or other mechanism that governs how a vaccine will be produced and distributed worldwide."

"A new, Linux-like platform could transform the way medicine is developed — and energize the race against COVID-19," reports Fast Company, while arguing that the old drug discovery system "was built to benefit shareholders, not patients."

Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes: Drug development in the U.S. has traditionally been cloistered and profit-motivated, which means that it has sometimes failed to tackle pressing needs. But an initiative called the Open Source Pharma Foundation hopes to apply some of the lessons of open-source software to the creation of new drugs — including ones that could help fight COVID-19.
From the article: The response to COVID-19 has been more open-source than any drug effort in modern memory. On January 11, less than two weeks after the virus was reported to the World Health Organization, Chinese researchers published a draft of the virus's genetic sequence. The information enabled scientists across the globe to begin developing tests, treatments, and vaccines. Pharmaceutical companies searched their archives for drugs that might be repurposed as treatments for COVID-19 and formed consortiums to combine resources and expedite the process. These efforts have yielded some 90 vaccine candidates, seven of which are in Phase I trials and three of which are advancing to Phase II. There are nearly 1,000 clinical trials listed with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention related to COVID-19.

The gathering of resources and grassroots sharing of information aimed at combating the coronavirus has put open-source methods of drug development front and center. "It's our moment," said Bernard Munos, a former corporate strategist at pharma company Eli Lilly... Munos has been arguing for an open-source approach to developing drugs since 2006. "A lot is at stake because if it's successful, the open-source model can be replicated to address other challenges in biomedical research."
So now the Open Source Pharma Foundation hopes to offer "a platform where scientists and researchers can freely access technological tools for researching disease, share their discoveries, launch investigations into molecules or potential drugs, and find entities to turn that research into medicine..." according to the article.

"If the platform succeeds, it would allow drugs to succeed on their merit and need, rather than their ability to be profitable."

Syfy Wire's "Bad Astronomy" column is written by astronomer Phil Plait, head science writer of Bill Nye Saves the World. This week he looked at the recently-declassified videos taken by the U.S. Navy's fighter jets showing unidentified flying objects "moving in weird and unexpected ways." ("The 'aura' around the object in some of the footage could simply be the camera overexposing around a bright object; infrared cameras can do that, creating an odd glow.")

But to prove they're not aliens, Plait ultimately cites an analysis on the site MetaBunk, "run by former video game programmer and critical thinker Mick West" -- and his videos summarizing discussions on the site's bulletin board:

[I]n this one he argues, convincingly to me, that the FLIR video just shows a passenger plane seen from a distance. He also shows that the rotation of the object in the GIMBAL video is almost certainly due to the motion of the camera itself as it tracks the objects. The fighter jet is turning, and at the same time the camera is mounted on a rotating mechanism that allows it to track. These two motions combine to make a somewhat confusing series of rotations in the image, which is why the object in the video appears to rotate around.

But my favorite bit is a video where he gives a single, simple explanation that accounts for two things seen in the Navy videos, specifically, why the object in the GOFAST video appears to scream across the water so rapidly, and how in the GIMBAL video the object seems to travel against a strong wind. The answer: It's an illusion due to parallax, how an object close to you seems to move more rapidly against a more distant background as the camera moves... Given the distance, angle, and motion, it's likely that the GOFAST video shows a balloon.
As a kind of consolation prize, the column concludes by sharing the cheesy opening credits to a 1970 precursor to the TV show Space: 1999 -- called UFO.

Charlotte Web writes: The U.S.-based research non-profit Ecohealth Alliance has spent 20 years investigating the origins of infectious diseases like Covid-19 in over 25 countries, "to do scientific research critical to preventing pandemics."

America just cut it's funding.

Trump's reason? "Unfounded rumors" and "conspiracy theories...without evidence," according to reports in Politico and Business Insider. The group had received a total of $3.7 million through 2019 (starting in 2014), publishing over 20 scientific papers since 2015 on how coronaviruses spread through bats, including at least one paper involving a lab in China. But during a White House press briefing, a conservative web site incorrectly stated the whole $3.7 million had gone to that single lab, while even more erroneously implying that that lab was somehow the source of the coronavirus. They'd then asked "Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?" and President Trump vowed he would revoke the (U.S.-based) nonprofit research group's grant, which he did 10 days later.
Slashdot referenced that research nonprofit just this Sunday, citing a recent interview with the group's president who'd said they'd found nearly 3% of the population in China's rural farming regions near wild animals already had antibodies to coronaviruses similar to SARS. "We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field."

Yet Thursday Politico reported the Trump administration "has been pressuring analysts, particularly at the CIA, to search for evidence that the virus came from a lab and that the World Health Organization helped China cover it up," citing a person briefed on those discussions. People briefed on the intelligence also told them there is currently no evidence to support that theory.

Michael Morell, the former acting director and deputy director of America's CIA, also pointed out Thursday that the lab in question was in fact partially funded by the United States. "So if it did escape, we're all in this together."

"The race for a vaccine to combat the new coronavirus is moving faster than researchers and drugmakers expected," reported Dow Jones News Services this week, "with Pfizer Inc. joining several other groups saying that they had accelerated the timetable for testing and that a vaccine could be ready for emergency use in the fall." Pfizer said Tuesday it will begin testing of its experimental vaccine in the U.S. as early as next week. On Monday, Oxford University researchers said their vaccine candidate could be available for emergency use as early as September if it passes muster in studies, while biotech Moderna Inc. said it was preparing to enter its vaccine into the second phase of human testing... If the vaccine shows signs of working safely in the study, Moderna said the third and final phase of testing could start in the fall. The company said it could seek FDA approval to sell the vaccine by year's end, if it succeeds in testing...

Merck & Co., a longtime maker of vaccines, said it is talking to potential partners about three different technologies to manufacture coronavirus vaccines... Johnson & Johnson said earlier this month it shaved months off the usual timelines for developing a vaccine, and expects to start human testing of a coronavirus candidate as soon as September, with possible availability on an emergency-use basis in early 2021.
SFGate also reports that GlaxoSmithKline and the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi "expect their vaccine will be ready for human testing in the second half of 2020."

And the Associated Press notes that America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "is tracking at least 86 active different approaches among pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers and scientists around the globe." Dr. Peter Marks, director of the agency's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, adds "We expect about two dozen more to enter clinical trials by this summer and early fall."

"Data from connected scale users suggests Americans, on average, are not gaining weight during lockdowns," writes long-time Slashdot reader pfhlick.

The Washington Post reports: Withings, the maker of popular Internet-connected scales and other body-measurement devices, studied what happened to the weight of some 450,000 of its American users between March 22 — when New York ordered people home — and April 18. Despite concerns about gaining a "quarantine 15," the average user gained 0.21 pounds during that month... Over the same March-April period in 2019, Withings said its American users gained slightly less weight — 0.19 pounds on average — though fewer people had the scales last year...

Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University — who wasn't involved with the Withings analysis — said he found the results a bit disappointing. "With the shutdown of the restaurants, I thought the numbers would have gotten better," he said. Home-cooked meals tend to be healthier than dining out.
Withings' numbers varied slightly for other countires. But citing a professor of medicine at Stanford, the article notes that average weight gains may be misleading, since some people "may be hitting their groove during stay-at-home orders by embracing cooking and taking up jogging. But others could be using food to cope with stress and gaining large amounts of weight." In fact, 37% of the scale owners gained more than a pound. (Which, if my math is correct, suggests that the other 63% had to lose at least .13 pounds.)

The article also notes that for buyers of Withings' scales, "contributing aggregate data is a condition included in its terms of service; its customers don't get the option to opt out if they want to use Withings products."

Appearing on CNN Thursday, Bill Gates called America's coronavirus testing data "bogus," in part because "the United States does not make sure you get results in 24 hours." Business Insider reports: Testing in the U.S. remains a long and complicated task, and it can take several days before people are told whether they have tested positive or negative for COVID-19. "If you get your test results within 24 hours so you can act on it, then let's count it," Gates said, adding that people were most infectious within the first three to four days after infection and might continue to interact with others and spread the virus until they have definitive results. "What's the point of the test?" he said. "That's your period of greatest infectiousness."

Gates added that residents of low-income neighborhoods had lesser access to testing facilities and were not prioritized, despite indications that the virus has taken a disproportionate toll on marginalized communities. "Our system fails to have the prioritization that would give us an accurate picture of what's going on," he said.
While America is now testing about 200,000 people a day, the article cites experts from Harvard University who believe 20 million tests a day are what's needed to fully "remobilize the economy."

New submitter penandpaper shares an excerpt from a NASA press release: NASA has selected three U.S. companies to design and develop human landing systems (HLS) for the agency's Artemis program, one of which will land the first woman and next man on the surface of the Moon by 2024. NASA is on track for sustainable human exploration of the Moon for the first time in history. The human landing system awards under the Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP-2) Appendix H Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) are firm-fixed price, milestone-based contracts. The total combined value for all awarded contracts is $967 million for the 10-month base period. The following companies were selected to design and build human landing systems:

- Blue Origin of Kent, Washington, is developing the Integrated Lander Vehicle (ILV) -- a three-stage lander to be launched on its own New Glenn Rocket System and ULA Vulcan launch system.
- Dynetics (a Leidos company) of Huntsville, Alabama, is developing the Dynetics Human Landing System (DHLS) -- a single structure providing the ascent and descent capabilities that will launch on the ULA Vulcan launch system.
- SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, is developing the Starship -- a fully integrated lander that will use the SpaceX Super Heavy rocket. "With these contract awards, America is moving forward with the final step needed to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024, including the incredible moment when we will see the first woman set foot on the lunar surface," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "This is the first time since the Apollo era that NASA has direct funding for a human landing system, and now we have companies on contract to do the work for the Artemis program."

Further reading: SpaceX and NASA Break Down What Their Historic First Astronaut Mission Will Look Like