Chinese bank depositors planning a protest about their frozen funds saw their health code mysteriously turn red and were stopped from traveling to the site of a rally, confirming fears that China's vast COVID-tracking system could be weaponized as a powerful tool to stifle dissent. Motherboard reports: A red health code designated the would-be protesters as suspected or confirmed COVID-19 patients, limiting their movement and access to public transportation. Their rallies in the central Henan province this week were thwarted as some were forced into quarantine and others detained by police. A 38-year-old software engineer was among hundreds who could not access their savings at four rural banks since mid-April. She had planned to travel from her home in Jiangxi province to Zhengzhou, Henan's capital city, to join a group petition this week to demand her money back. But her health code turned from green to red shortly after she bought a train ticket on Sunday. She said a nucleic test for COVID she took the night before came back negative and her hometown has not reported any infection recently.

"Henan authorities targeted the health code of bank depositors in order to stop us from defending our rights," she told VICE World News, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid government reprisal. She eventually managed to reach Zhengzhou using her green health code on a different app, but was daunted by the sight of police officers out in force. More than 200 bank depositors from all over the country saw their health codes turned red over the past week, which effectively foiled a planned protest outside the Henan branch of China's banking regulator. Chinese activists and dissidents have reported similar experiences in the past, but the latest crackdown appears to be the most brazen example of how the authorities could exploit the supposed COVID-19 measure for political purposes.

Having bright colours and greenery in our cities can make people happier and calmer, according to an unusual experiment involving virtual reality headsets. From a report: A team of researchers at the University of Lille, in France, used VR to test how volunteers reacted to variations of a minimalist concrete, glass and metal urban landscape. The 36 participants walked on the spot in a laboratory wearing a VR headset with eye trackers, and researchers tweaked their surroundings, adding combinations of vegetation, as well as bright yellow and pink colours, and contrasting, angular patterns on the path.

By tracking their blink rate, the researchers learned about what the volunteers were most interested in. The participants then filled out a questionnaire about their experience. The researchers found that the volunteers walked more slowly and their heart rate increased when they saw green vegetation in their urban setting. They also kept their heads higher, looking forward and around, instead of towards the ground. While adding and taking away colour didn't make quite as much of a difference for the participants, they were more curious and alert when colourful patterns were added to the ground they were virtually stepping on, according to the study. According to Yvonne Delevoye-Turrell, a professor of cognitive psychology at the university and the lead author on this study, the results demonstrated that the urban experience had been made more pleasurable.

The member countries of the World Trade Organization agreed Friday on a narrow measure aimed at boosting the supplies of Covid-19 vaccines in developing countries, wrapping up a bitter fight over corporate patent rights governing critical medical products during a pandemic. WSJ: The compromise measure on intellectual property rights will make it easier for companies in developing nations such as South Africa to manufacture and export a patented Covid-19 vaccine -- under limited circumstances -- without a consent from the patent holder if they have the approval of their own governments. Meeting for the first time in nearly five years, trade ministers from more than 100 countries also agreed on measures to reduce fisheries subsidies to protect fish stocks and pledged to minimize export restrictions on food items amid shortages triggered by the war in Ukraine. An existing ban on the collection of customs duty on digitally-transmitted products like music and movies was continued, to the relief of U.S. officials who had feared a possible change in the status quo would harm U.S. businesses.

A retracted paper highlights chemistry's history of trying to avoid the expensive, toxic -- but necessary -- catalyst. From a report: It's hard to find a place on Earth untouched by palladium. The silvery-white metal is a key part of catalytic converters in the world's 1.4 billion cars, which spew specks of palladium into the atmosphere. Mining and other sources add to this pollution. As a result, traces of palladium show up in some of the most remote spots on Earth, from Antarctica to the top of the Greenland ice sheet. Palladium is also practically indispensable for making drugs. That's because catalysts with palladium atoms at their core have an unmatched ability to help stitch together carbon --carbon bonds. This kind of chemical reaction is key to building organic molecules, especially those used in medications.

"Every pharmaceutical we produce at some point or another has a palladium-catalysed step in it," says Per-Ola Norrby, a pharmaceutical researcher at drug giant AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden. Palladium-catalysed reactions are so valuable that, in 2010, their discoverers shared a Nobel prize. But despite its versatility, chemists are trying to move away from palladium. The metal is more expensive than gold, and molecules that contain palladium can also be extremely toxic to humans and wildlife. Chemical manufacturers have to separate out all traces of palladium from their products and carefully dispose of the hazardous waste, which adds extra expense. Thomas Fuchb, a medicinal chemist at the life-sciences company Merck in Darmstadt, Germany, gives the example of a reaction to make 3 kilograms of a drug molecule for which the ingredients cost US$250,000. The palladium catalyst alone adds $100,000; purifying it out of the product another $30,000.

Finding less-toxic alternatives to the metal could help to reduce environmental harm from palladium waste and move the chemicals industry towards 'greener' reactions, says Tianning Diao, an organometallic chemist at New York University. Researchers hope to swap palladium for more common metals, such as iron and nickel, or invent metal-free catalysts that sidestep the issue altogether. Several times in the past two decades, researchers have reported finding palladium-free catalysts. But in what has become a recurring pattern for the field, each heralded discovery turned out to be a mistake.

Keeping people out of rip currents is more about reading human behavior than reading warning signs. From a report: Worldwide, rips cause hundreds of drownings and necessitate tens of thousands of rescues every year. In Australia, where 85 percent of the population lives within an hour's drive of the coast, rips cause more fatalities than floods, cyclones, and shark attacks combined. In 1938, one of the country's most popular beaches, Sydney's Bondi Beach, was the site of an infamous rip-current tragedy: within minutes, roughly 200 swimmers were swept away by a rip, leaving 35 people unconscious and five dead. More often, however, rips take one life at a time, garnering little media attention. For many casual beach visitors, the toll of rip currents goes unnoticed. [...] Although almost three-quarters of beach users said they knew what a rip current is, only 54 percent could correctly define it. In addition, only half of the people she surveyed remembered seeing either the warning signs or the colored flags denoting surf conditions that were posted on or near the main access point to each beach. An even smaller percentage could recall what color the flags had been -- green for calm, yellow for moderate, or red for dangerous conditions. "I was genuinely shocked," Locknick says.

[...] Part of the challenge of preventing rip-related drownings stems from the lack of a simple method to escape them. Rip currents form when waves pile water near the shoreline. The water then gushes back out to sea, taking the path of least resistance. It might flow along channels carved in between sandbars or next to solid structures, such as jetties or rocky headlands. These types of rips can stick around year after year. Others are more erratic, creating fleeting bursts of seaward-flowing water on smooth, open beaches. People often mislabel rip currents as undertows or rip tides. Rip currents are not caused by tides, however, and undertows are a different, weaker current, formed when water pushed onto the beach moves back offshore along the seabed. Some telltale signs of a rip include a streak of churned-up, sandy water or a dark, flat gap between breaking waves.

It's not surprising that rip currents are often misunderstood by the public because, for decades, beach-safety experts also had an oversimplified perception of their mechanics. In some of the earliest research on rips in the mid-20th century, American scientists watched sticks, pieces of kelp, and volleyballs float out to sea and described lanes of flowing water extending more than 300 meters offshore. This work formed the basis for the popular view of rip currents as jets flowing perpendicular to the beach, shooting out past the surf. To escape the river of current, experts recommended that bathers swim parallel to the beach -- a message once broadcast through education campaigns and warning signs in the United States and Australia. As it turns out, that approach may not always work.

A decade ago, particle physicists thrilled the world. On 4 July 2012, 6000 researchers working with the world's biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key to their abstruse explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass. The discovery fulfilled a 45-year-old prediction, completed a theory called the standard model, and thrust physicists into the spotlight. Then came a long hangover. From a report: Before the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped LHC started to take data in 2010, physicists fretted that it might produce the Higgs and nothing else, leaving no clue to what lies beyond the standard model. So far, that nightmare scenario is coming true. "It's a bit disappointing," allows Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. "I thought we would discover supersymmetry," the leading extension of the standard model.

It's too early to despair, many physicists say. After 3 years of upgrades, the LHC is now powering up for the third of five planned runs, and some new particle could emerge in the billions of proton-proton collisions it will produce every second. In fact, the LHC should run for another 16 years, and with further upgrades should collect 16 times as much data as it already has. All those data could reveal subtle signs of novel particles and phenomena. Still, some researchers say the writing is on the wall for collider physics. "If they don't find anything, this field is dead," says Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago who hunts dark matter in smaller experiments. John Ellis, a theorist at King's College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long, uncertain grind toward discovery. "It's going to be like pulling teeth, not like teeth falling out."

China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery. From a report: The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye -- the world's largest radio telescope -- differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley. It isn't clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China's science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, including state-run ones.
UPDATE (6/18/2022):A co-author on the research project which first spotted the signals has now said the signals came from human radio interference, "and not from extraterrestrial."

There are no environmental showstoppers in SpaceX's plans to launch a giant new rocket to orbit from South Texas, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday. From a report: An environmental assessment by the agency has concluded that SpaceX's plans for orbital launches will have "no significant impact" on the region along the Gulf Coast near Brownsville, Texas. But the F.A.A. is also requiring the company to undertake more than 75 actions to minimize the impact on the surrounding areas as it begins flights of Starship, a vehicle that is central to NASA's plans to return to the moon as well as the vision of Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, to colonize Mars. The actions Mr. Musk's company must take include earlier notice of launches, monitoring of vegetation and wildlife by a biologist, coordination with state and federal agencies to remove launch debris from sensitive habitats and adjustment of lighting to lessen impact on wildlife and a nearby beach. The mitigation measures required by the F.A.A. also restrict closures of a highway that passes the SpaceX site during launches so that people can visit the nearby beach, park and wildlife refuge. The agency said the highway could not be closed on 18 holidays and not on more than five weekends a year.

Astronomers have unveiled the most detailed survey of the Milky Way, revealing thousands of "starquakes" and stellar DNA, and helping to identify the most habitable corners of our home galaxy. From a report: The observations from the European Space Agency's Gaia probe cover almost two billion stars -- about 1% of the total number in the galaxy -- and are allowing astronomers to reconstruct our home galaxy's structure and find out how it has evolved over billions of years. Previous surveys by Gaia, a robotic spacecraft launched in 2013, have pinpointed the motion of the stars in our home galaxy in exquisite detail. By rewinding these movements astronomers can model how our galaxy has morphed over time. The latest observations add details of chemical compositions, stellar temperatures, colours, masses and ages based on spectroscopy, where starlight is split into different wavelengths.

These measurements unexpectedly revealed thousands of starquakes, cataclysmic tsunami-like events on the surface of stars. "Starquakes teach us a lot about stars -- notably, their internal workings," said Conny Aerts of KU Leuven in Belgium, who is a member of the Gaia collaboration. "Gaia is opening a goldmine for asteroseismology of massive stars." Dr George Seabroke, senior research associate at Mullard space science laboratory at University College London, said: "If you can see these stars changing in brightness halfway across the Milky Way, if you were anywhere near them, it would be like the sun changing shape in front of your eyes." Gaia is fitted with a 1bn pixel camera -- the largest ever in space -- complete with more than 100 electronic detectors. The latest dataset represents the largest chemical map of the galaxy to date, cataloguing the composition of six million stars, ten times the number measured in previous ground-based catalogues.

The particle collider at CERN will soon restart. From a report: In April, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside Geneva, once again fired up their cosmic gun, the Large Hadron Collider. After a three-year shutdown for repairs and upgrades, the collider has resumed shooting protons -- the naked guts of hydrogen atoms -- around its 17-mile electromagnetic underground racetrack. In early July, the collider will begin crashing these particles together to create sparks of primordial energy. And so the great game of hunting for the secret of the universe is about to be on again, amid new developments and the refreshed hopes of particle physicists. Even before its renovation, the collider had been producing hints that nature could be hiding something spectacular. Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College London who conducts an experiment at CERN, described data from his previous runs as "the most exciting set of results I've seen in my professional lifetime."

A decade ago, CERN physicists made global headlines with the discovery of the Higgs boson, a long-sought particle, which imparts mass to all the other particles in the universe. What is left to find? Almost everything, optimistic physicists say. When the CERN collider was first turned on in 2010, the universe was up for grabs. The machine, the biggest and most powerful ever built, was designed to find the Higgs boson. That particle is the keystone of the Standard Model, a set of equations that explains everything scientists have been able to measure about the subatomic world. But there are deeper questions about the universe that the Standard Model does not explain: Where did the universe come from? Why is it made of matter rather than antimatter? What is the "dark matter" that suffuses the cosmos? How does the Higgs particle itself have mass? Physicists hoped that some answers would materialize in 2010 when the large collider was first turned on. Nothing showed up except the Higgs -- in particular, no new particle that might explain the nature of dark matter. Frustratingly, the Standard Model remained unshaken.

"All appeared to be going smoothly," reports CBS News, "when, about a minute before the second stage engine was expected to shut down, an onboard 'rocketcam' showed a flash in the engine's exhaust plume.

"The camera view them showed what appeared to be a tumble before video from the rocket cut off...." California-based Astra on Sunday launched two shoebox-size NASA satellites from Cape Canaveral in a modest mission to improve hurricane forecasts, but the second stage of the company's low-cost booster malfunctioned before reaching orbit and the payloads were lost.

"The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit," Astra tweeted. "We have shared our regrets with @NASA and the payload team. More information will be provided after we complete a full data analysis."

It was the seventh launch of Astra's small "Venture-class" rocket and the company's fifth failure. Sunday's launch was the first of three planned for NASA to launch six small CubeSats, two at a time, into three orbital planes. Given the somewhat risky nature of relying on tiny shoebox-size CubeSats and a rocket with a very short track record, the $40 million project requires just four satellites and two successful launches to meet mission objectives. The NASA contract calls for the final two flights by the end of July. Whether Astra can meet that schedule given Sunday's failure is not yet known.

"Although today's launch with @Astra did not go as planned, the mission offered a great opportunity for new science and launch capabilities," tweeted NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen.... After Sunday's failure, he tweeted: "Even though we are disappointed right now, we know: There is value in taking risks in our overall NASA Science portfolio because innovation is required for us to lead."

On June 4 a 10-minute Blue Origin flight (using a reusable rocket and capsule) carried six more people on a visit to suborbital space, reports Space.com — the fifth human spaceflight mission for the Jeff Bezos-founded company, and the second one this year. But GeekWire points out that civil production engineer Victor Correa Hespanha had his seat funded by the Crypto Space Agency — that is, funded entirely by the NFT community through mint proceeds — after he was the winner of its lottery for a ride to space.

And they're not the only crypto community buying rides into space. CNET reports on MoonDAO: Over 8,000 people "minted" a "Ticket to Space" NFT on the Ethereum blockchain for free (plus a small transaction or "gas" fee), and...one of those NFT holders plus several alternates will be chosen at random for one of the seats to space. MoonDAO's members will also vote on a specific person from a list of predetermined nominees to gift the second ticket to. The two astronauts could fly as soon as the next Blue Origin launch in the coming weeks, but no target date has been announced....

"Our mission is to decentralize access to space research and exploration," co-founder Pablo Moncada-Larrotiz told me during an interview on stage at the DAODenver conference in February. In addition to sending people on a short trip to space, MoonDAO is also using funds from its treasury — it's raised millions worth of cryptocurrency through a crowdfunding platform called Juicebox — for community projects that include designing a small rocket and satellite. In other words, the ultimate vision is to build an organization something like SpaceX, but that's run as a community cooperative rather than in the traditional top-down corporate structure.

"We definitely need more capital to get to the level of competing directly with Virgin Galactic or SpaceX," Moncada-Larrotiz said via Discord direct message on May 26. "It's for sure a long term project and I think it'll be a matter of building the right type of organization where builders are free to just focus on making awesome things in a collaborative environment."
Unfortunately, MoonDAO's drawing Saturday experienced technical glitches, and after a two-hour livestream — no winner was chosen.

They promised a winner would be chosen by Sunday.

"If, as astronomers believe, the death of large stars leave behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy," notes an announcement from the University of California at Berkeley. "The problem is, isolated black holes are invisible.

"Now, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object's strong gravitational field — so-called gravitational microlensing." The team, led by graduate student Casey Lam and Jessica Lu, a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy, estimates that the mass of the invisible compact object is between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the sun. Because astronomers think that the leftover remnant of a dead star must be heavier than 2.2 solar masses in order to collapse to a black hole, the UC Berkeley researchers caution that the object could be a neutron star instead of a black hole. Neutron stars are also dense, highly compact objects, but their gravity is balanced by internal neutron pressure, which prevents further collapse to a black hole.

Whether a black hole or a neutron star, the object is the first dark stellar remnant — a stellar "ghost" — discovered wandering through the galaxy unpaired with another star.

"This is the first free-floating black hole or neutron star discovered with gravitational microlensing," Lu said. "With microlensing, we're able to probe these lonely, compact objects and weigh them. I think we have opened a new window onto these dark objects, which can't be seen any other way...." The analysis by Lam, Lu and their international team has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The analysis includes four other microlensing events that the team concluded were not caused by a black hole, though two were likely caused by a white dwarf or a neutron star.

The team also concluded that the likely population of black holes in the galaxy is 200 million — about what most theorists predicted.

Notably, a competing team from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore analyzed the same microlensing event and claims that the mass of the compact object is closer to 7.1 solar masses and indisputably a black hole. A paper describing the analysis by the STScI team, led by Kailash Sahu, has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal....

The astrometric data came from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.... While surveys like these discover about 2,000 stars brightened by microlensing each year in the Milky Way galaxy, the addition of astrometric data is what allowed the two teams to determine the mass of the compact object and its distance from Earth.

Four months ago, NASA's Mars rover Perseverance picked up a "pet rock," tucked inside its left front wheel, that's been riding along ever since. Space.com reports: So far, its ridden across 5.3 miles (8.5 kilometers) with the Perseverance rover as it drives across its Jezero Crater home on Mars.

Perseverance has carried the rock north across its landing site, named for the famed late science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, and then west across a region called "Kodiak," the remains of a former delta at Jezero. The rover is currently in the midst of what NASA calls its Delta Front Campaign and may have drilled into its first sedimentary Mars rock, Ravanis wrote.

"Perseverance's pet rock is now a long way from home," Ravanis wrote. "It's possible that the rock may fall out at some point along our future ascent of the crater rim. If it does so, it will land amongst rocks that we expect to be very different from itself."

If that happens, a future Martian geologist might be a bit confused to find the rock so out of place, Ravanis added.

In 2003, the Human Genome Project finished sequencing every bit of human DNA, remembers MIT News.

"Now, over two decades later, MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman and colleagues have gone beyond the sequence to present the first comprehensive functional map of genes that are expressed in human cells." The data from this project, published online June 9 in Cell, ties each gene to its job in the cell, and is the culmination of years of collaboration on the single-cell sequencing method Perturb-seq.

The data are available for other scientists to use. "It's a big resource in the way the human genome is a big resource, in that you can go in and do discovery-based research," says Weissman, who is also a member of the Whitehead Institute and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute....

"I think this dataset is going to enable all sorts of analyses that we haven't even thought up yet by people who come from other parts of biology, and suddenly they just have this available to draw on," says former Weissman Lab postdoc Tom Norman, a co-senior author of the paper.
The announcement credits the single-sequencing tool Perturb-seq and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing which introduced genetic changes into cells and then captured information about which RNAs expressed (uses single-cell RNA sequencing).

The researchers scaled the method to the entire genome using human blood cancer cell lines and noncancerous cells derived from the retina, ultimately using Perturb-seq across more than 2.5 million cells.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the news.

Researchers have found that being outside drastically reduces the risk of developing short-sightedness. From a report: In the early 1980s Taiwan's army realised it had a problem. More and more of its conscripts seemed to be short-sighted, meaning they needed glasses to focus on distant objects. "They were worried that if the worst happened [ie, an attack by China] their troops would be fighting at a disadvantage," says Ian Morgan, who studies myopia at Australian National University, in Canberra. An island-wide study in 1983 confirmed that around 70% of Taiwanese school leavers needed glasses or contact lenses to see properly. These days, that number is above 80%. But happily for Taiwan's generals, the military disparity has disappeared. Over the past few decades myopia rates have soared across East Asia (see chart 1 in the linked story). In the 1960s around 20-30% of Chinese school-leavers were short-sighted. These days they are just as myopic as their cousins across the straits, with rates in some parts of China running at over 80%.

Elsewhere on the continent things are even worse. One study of male high-school leavers in Seoul found 97% were short-sighted. Hong Kong and Singapore are not far behind. And although the problem is worst in East Asia, it is not unique to it. Reliable numbers for America and Europe are harder to come by. But one review article, published in 2015, claimed a European rate of between 20% and 40% -- an order of magnitude higher than that which people working in the field think is the "natural," background rate. For most of those affected, myopia is a lifelong, expensive nuisance. But severe myopia can lead to untreatable vision loss, says Annegret Dahlmann-Noor, a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, in London. A paper published in 2019 concluded that each one-dioptre worsening in myopia was associated with a 67% increase in prevalence of myopic maculopathy, an untreatable condition that causes blindness. (A dioptre is a measure of a lens's focusing power.) In some parts of East Asia, 20% of young people have severe myopia, defined as -6 dioptres or worse (see chart 2 in linked story). "This is storing up a big problem for the coming decades," says Kathryn Rose, head of orthoptics at the University of Technology, Sydney.

The first global survey of marine RNA viruses has discovered thousands of new viruses, some of which play a central role in locking away carbon at the bottom of the sea. From a report: Between 2009 and 2012, researchers aboard a ship called Tara collected seawater samples from all the world's oceans. Guillermo Dominguez-Huerta at the Ohio State University and his colleagues had previously looked at hundreds of thousands of DNA viruses in these samples and found they were concentrated in five major ecological zones, with some of the greatest diversity in the Arctic Ocean. But this only told half of the story. The ocean is also filled with viruses that have genomes made of a different genetic material called RNA, which cells use to direct protein synthesis. Analysing DNA viruses was relatively easy using existing methods, but the researchers had to come up with improved techniques to distinguish viral RNA from the surfeit of RNA produced by the other organisms swimming in each sample.

Now, Dominguez-Huerta and his colleagues have published the biggest-ever survey of RNA viruses in the ocean using the samples from Tara. The researchers identified more than 5000 types of RNA viruses in the sea, almost all of which were new to science. "It has expanded our view of how much diversity there is," says Curtis Suttle at the University of British Columbia, who wasn't involved in the study. The team focused particularly on the role viruses play in carbon sequestration. Every day, massive numbers of dead plankton sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking the carbon in their bodies with them, which is then entombed for potentially millions of years. This process, known as the biological carbon pump, puts away as much as 12 gigatonnes of carbon each year. That is about a third of the total annual human-caused CO2 emissions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Robots can now be covered in living skin grown from real human cells to make them look more like us. As robots increasingly take on roles as nurses, care workers, teachers and other jobs that involve close personal contact, it is important to make them look more human so we feel comfortable interacting with them, says Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan. At the moment, robots are sometimes coated in silicone rubber to give them a fleshy appearance, but the rubber lacks the texture of human skin, he says.

To make more realistic-looking skin, Takeuchi and his colleagues bathed a plastic robot finger in a soup of collagen and human skin cells called fibroblasts for three days. The collagen and fibroblasts adhered to the finger and formed a layer similar to the dermis, which is the second-from-top layer of human skin. Next, they gently poured other human skin cells called keratinocytes onto the finger to recreate the upper layer of human skin, called the epidermis. The resulting 1.5-millimeter-thick skin was able to stretch and contract as the finger bent backwards and forwards. As it did this, it wrinkled like normal skin, says Takeuchi. "It is much more realistic than silicone."

The robot skin could also be healed when it was cut by grafting a collagen sheet onto the wound. However, the skin began to dry out after a while since it didn't have blood vessels to replenish it with moisture. In the future, it may be possible to incorporate artificial blood vessels into the skin to keep it hydrated, as well as sweat glands and hair follicles to make it more realistic, says Takeuchi. It should also be possible to make different skin colors by adding melanocytes, he says. The researchers now plan to try coating a whole robot in the living skin. The research has been published in the journal Matter.

schwit1 shares a report from The Verge: NASA's new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), got pelted by a larger than expected micrometeoroid at the end of May, causing some detectable damage to one of the spacecraft's 18 primary mirror segments. The impact means that the mission team will have to correct for the distortion created by the strike, but NASA says that the telescope is "still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements."

Engineers do have the capability to also maneuver JWST's mirror and instruments away from showers of space debris, if NASA can see them coming. The problem, though, was that this micrometeoroid was not part of a shower, so NASA considers it an "unavoidable chance event." Still, the agency is forming an engineering team to come up with ways to potentially avoid or lessen the effects of micrometeoroid strikes of this size. And since JWST is so sensitive, the telescope will also help NASA get a better understanding of just how many micrometeoroids there are in the deep space environment.

Despite the strike, NASA remained optimistic in its post about JWST's future. "Webb's beginning-of-life performance is still well above expectations, and the observatory is fully capable of performing the science it was designed to achieve," according to the blog. Engineers can also adjust the impacted mirror to help cancel out the data distortion. The mission team has done this already and will continue to tinker with the mirror over time to get the best results. It's a process that will be ongoing throughout JWST's planned five to 10 years of life as new observations are made and events unfold. At the same time, NASA warns that the engineers will not be able to completely cancel out the impact of the strike.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Scientists in Australia have discovered that superworms can live and even grow on a diet of only polystyrene, also known colloquially as Styrofoam. Superworm is a common name for the larval stages of the darkling beetle (Zophobas morio). The researchers described their finding as a "first step" in discovering natural enzymes that could be used to recycle this type of plastic. "We envision that polystyrene waste will be collected, mechanically shredded, and then degraded in bioreactors with an enzyme cocktail," said Chris Rinke, a scientist at the University of Queensland and an author of a paper published on Thursday in the journal Microbial Genomics.

In recent years, scientists globally have been looking for microorganisms that can digest plastic, which is how natural materials like wood biodegrade. The idea is that some kind of enzyme engineered from the gut of an insect or bacteria could be used to digest difficult-to-recycle plastic so it could be made into new plastic products, which would reduce the need for virgin plastic. Used for things such as coffee cups and packing peanuts, polystyrene is one of the most common plastics in production. It accounts for "up to 7-10% of the total non-fibre plastic production," according to the paper.

Experimenters divided worms into three groups and fed each a different diet: bran, polystyrene or a starvation diet. The worms that lived on polystyrene were not as healthy as those eating bran, but they were able to eat the Styrofoam and gain weight and complete their life cycle. However, the report also found that the diet had "negative impacts on host gut microbiome diversity and health" of the worms. In other words, they could eat plastics, but it had a cost to them. It would theoretically be possible to keep thousands of worms in an industrial setting to digest plastics. But the researchers say their next goal is to identify and enhance the enzyme the worms use for future applications.