sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A physics mystery has come to an end, with a resolution about as shocking as "the butler did it." For a decade, physicists have pondered why nuclear reactors pump out fewer particles called neutrinos than predicted. Some suggested the elusive bits of matter might be morphing into weirder, undetectable "sterile" neutrinos. Instead, new results pin down what other experiments had suggested: that theorists overestimated how many neutrinos a reactor should produce. [...]

In a reactor's core, uranium and plutonium nuclei split in a chain reaction, and the antineutrinos come from the radioactive "beta decay" of the lighter nuclei left behind. In such decay, a neutron in a nucleus changes into a proton while emitting an electron and an electron antineutrino. To predict the total flux of antineutrinos, physicists had to account for the amounts and decays of myriad different nuclei. That accounting pointed to a shortfall, but in 2017, physicists from the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China called it into question. They studied antineutrinos from six commercial reactors, burning fuel with 4% uranium-235 atoms, which can sustain a chain reaction, and 96% uranium-238 atoms, which can't. As the uranium-235 is consumed, neutrons from its fission convert uranium-238 into plutonium-239, which also sustains a chain reaction. Daya Bay physicists found the antineutrino deficit shrank as the amount of uranium-235 fell, suggesting theorists had overestimated the flux of antineutrinos originating from uranium-235.

Now, physicists working at a small research reactor in France have confirmed that suspicion. The reactor at the Laue-Langevin Institute (ILL) produces copious neutrons for studies of materials. It also uses fuel containing 93% uranium-235. So, by studying the antineutrinos from it, researchers working with a neutrino detector called STEREO could measure the flux of antineutrinos from uranium-235 alone. The detector consists of six identical oil-filled segments lined up like teeth and spanning a distance of 9 to 11 meters from the reactor's core. Rarely, a proton in the oil will absorb an electron antineutrino to turn into a neutron while ejecting a positron -- sort of the reverse of beta decay. As the positron streaks through the oil, it produces light in proportion to the energy of the original neutrino. STEREO researchers showed the spectrum of energies of electron antineutrinos remained the same as distance from the core increased. That observation clashes with the idea that some are morphing into sterile neutrinos, because lower energy neutrinos should morph faster than higher energy ones, changing the spectrum as the neutrinos advance. STEREO researchers also showed the total flux of antineutrinos from uranium-235 was lower than the one used in theorists' models, as they report today in Nature. Taken together, the observations put an end to the reactor antineutrino deficit as evidence for a 1-eV sterile neutrino, says David Lhuillier, a neutrino physicist at France's Atomic Energy Commission and spokesperson for the 26-member STEREO team. "Can it be explained by a sterile neutrino of mass around 1 eV? The answer is no."

Other experiments -- such as one called PROSPECT at Oak Ridge National Laboratory -- had reached similar conclusions, Lhuillier notes.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Moderna is considering raising the price of its COVID-19 vaccine by over 400 percent -- from $26 per dose to between $110 and $130 per dose -- according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. The plan, if realized, would match the previously announced price hike for Pfizer-BioNTech's rival COVID-19 vaccine. The Journal spoke with Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco Monday, who said of the 400 percent price hike: "I would think this type of pricing is consistent with the value."

Until now, the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have been purchased by the government and offered to Americans for free. In the latest federal contract from July, Moderna's updated booster shot cost the government $26 per dose, up from $15-$16 per dose in earlier supply contracts, the Journal notes. Similarly, the government paid a little over $30 per dose for Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine this past summer, up from $19.50 per dose in contracts from 2020. But now that the federal government is backing away from distributing the vaccines, their makers are moving to the commercial market -- with price adjustments. Financial analysts had previously anticipated Pfizer would set the commercial price for its vaccine at just $50 per dose but were taken aback in October when Pfizer announced plans of a price between $110 and $130. Analysts then anticipated that Pfizer's price would push Moderna and other vaccine makers to follow suit, which appears to be happening now.

New medicines need not be tested in animals to receive U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, according to legislation signed by President Joe Biden in late December 2022. Science Magazine reports: "This is huge," says Tamara Drake, director of research and regulatory policy at the Center for a Humane Economy, a nonprofit animal welfare organization and key driver of the legislation. "It's a win for industry. It's a win for patients in need of cures." In place of the 1938 stipulation that potential drugs be tested for safety and efficacy in animals, the law allows FDA to promote a drug or biologic -- a larger molecule such as an antibody -- to human trials after either animal or nonanimal tests. Drake's group and the nonprofit Animal Wellness Action, among others that pushed for changes, argue that in clearing drugs for human trials the agency should rely more heavily on computer modeling, "organ chips," and other nonanimal methods that have been developed over the past 10 to 15 years.

But pro-research groups are downplaying the law, saying it signals a slow turning of the tide -- not a tsunami that will remake the drug approval process overnight. Jim Newman, communications director at Americans for Medical Progress, which advocates for animal research, argues non-animal technologies are still "in their infancy" and won't be able to replace animal models for "many, many years." FDA still retains tremendous discretion to require animal tests, he notes, and he doesn't expect the agency to change tack anytime soon. In order for a drug to be approved in the United States, FDA typically requires toxicity tests on one rodent species such as a mouse or rat and one nonrodent species such as a monkey or dog. Companies use tens of thousands of animals for such tests each year. Yet more than nine in 10 drugs that enter human clinical trials fail because they are unsafe or ineffective, providing grist to those who argue that animal experiments are a waste of time, money, and lives. [...]

Now, that requirement is gone. In eliminating it, Congress seems to have responded to the emergence of nonanimal methods and growing public sentiment against animal research. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), who both call animal research inefficient and inhumane, introduced the changes, which the Senate passed by unanimous consent in September 2022. In December, Biden signed them into law as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which funds the government through this fiscal year. [...] Still, it remains unclear just how much the new law will change things at FDA. Although the legislation allows the agency to clear a drug for human trials without animal testing, it doesn't require that it do so. What's more, FDA's toxicologists are famously conservative, preferring animal tests in part because they allow examination of a potential drug's toxic effects in every organ after the animal is euthanized.

A federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves as concerns about indoor pollution linked to childhood asthma rise, Bloomberg first reported. CNN reports: A US Consumer Product Safety commissioner told Bloomberg gas stove usage is a "hidden hazard." "Any option is on the table. Products that can't be made safe can be banned," agency commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. said in a Bloomberg interview. The report said the agency plans "to take action" to address the indoor pollution caused by stoves.

The CPSC has been considering action on gas stoves for months.Trumka recommended in October that the CPSC seek public comment on the hazards associated with gas stoves. The pollutants have been linked to asthma and worsening respiratory conditions. A December 2022 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that indoor gas stove usage is associated with an increased risk of current asthma among children. The study found that almost 13% of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use. Trumka told Bloomberg the agency plans to open public comment on gas stove hazards.

Options besides a ban include "setting standards on emissions from the appliances." In a statement to CNN, the CPSC said the agency has not proposed any regulatory action on gas stoves at this time, and any regulatory action would "involve a lengthy process." "Agency staff plans to start gathering data and perspectives from the public on potential hazards associated with gas stoves, and proposed solutions to those hazards later this year," the commission said in a statement. "Commission staff also continues to work with voluntary standards organizations to examine gas stove emissions and address potential hazards."

Britain's attempt to become the first European nation to launch satellites into space ended in bitter disappointment early on Tuesday when Virgin Orbit said its rocket had suffered an anomaly that prevented it from reaching orbit. From a report: The "horizontal launch" mission had left from the coastal town of Newquay in southwest England, with Virgin's LauncherOne rocket carried under the wing of a modified Boeing 747 called "Cosmic Girl", and later released over the Atlantic Ocean. "We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit," the company said. "We are evaluating the information." The failure deals a further blow to European space ambitions after an Italian-built Vega-C rocket mission failed after lift-off from French Guiana in late December.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A small biotech company claims it has used a technology called reprogramming to rejuvenate old mice and extend their lives, a result suggesting that one day older people could have their biological clocks turned back with an injection -- literally becoming younger. The life-extension claim in rodents, made by Rejuvenate Bio, a San Diego biotech company, appears in a preprint paper on the website BioRxiv and hasn't been peer reviewed.

Noah Davidsohn, chief scientific officer of Rejuvenate, says the company used gene therapy to add three powerful reprogramming genes to the bodies of mice that were equivalent in age to human 77-year-olds. After the treatment, their remaining life span was doubled, the company says. Treated mice lived another 18 weeks, on average, while control mice died in nine weeks. Overall, the treated mice lived about 7% longer. Although the increase in lifespan was modest, the company says the research provides a demonstration of age reversal in an animal. "This is a powerful technology, and here is the proof of concept," says Davidsohn. "I wanted to show that it's actually something we can do in our elderly population."

Scientists not connected to the company called the study an exciting landmark but cautioned that whole-body rejuvenation using gene therapy remains a poorly understood concept with huge risks. "It's a beautiful intellectual exercise, but I would shy away from doing anything remotely similar to a person," says Vittorio Sebastiano, a professor at Stanford University. One risk is that the powerful programming process can cause cancer. Such an effect is often seen in mice. Even so, the chance that reprogramming could be an elixir of youth has led to a research and investment boom. One company, Altos Labs, says it has raised over $3 billion. "Far more information will be needed to learn exactly what changes the reprogramming genes cause in the mice, and researchers say other groups will need to repeat the experiment before they are convinced," adds the report.

"Sebastiano says the life-extension effect reported by Rejuvenate could be due to changes in a single organ or group of cells, rather than a general mouse-wide rejuvenation effect. Among other shortfalls in its research, Rejuvenate did not carefully document which and how many cells were changed by the genetic treatment."

Britain has conducted its first orbital space launch from UK soil on Monday evening, making it the privately-owned Virgin Orbit's first international launch. Deutsche Welle reports: Dubbed "Start Me Up," as in the Rolling Stones song, the rocket is carrying nine small satellites now making their way into space. The repurposed Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 aircraft took off from Cornwall in southwestern England at around 10:15 pm local time (2215 GMT) before releasing the rocket around an hour into flight over the Atlantic Ocean, toward the south of Ireland. The nine satellites the rocket will bring into orbit will be used for both civil and defense purposes. The plane, meanwhile, should make its way back to Cornwall.

The commercial satellite launch, described by Virgin Orbit as "history-making," is not only the first in the UK but in the whole of Western Europe, according to the UK Space Agency. Though the UK has produced satellites in the past, they were sent to spaceports abroad to be launched into space. Ian Annett, deputy chief executive at the UK Space Agency, said, "This is the start of a new era for the UK in terms of launch capabilities." He added that the UK had ambitions for being ''the hub of European launches." Virgin Orbit has previously launched four similar missions from California.

UPDATE: According to the Guardian, the historic space mission "ended in bitter disappointment" after the rocket carrying the first satellites "failed to reach orbit and was lost."

"To date, about 500 people have been put in cryogenic stasis after legal death," writes a Bloomberg Opinion technology columnist, "with the majority of them in the U.S.

"But a few thousand more, including Emil Kendziorra, are on waiting lists, wearing bracelets or necklaces with instructions for emergency responders. " Kendziorra, 36, runs Berlin-based Tomorrow Biostasis GmbH, one of the first cryonics businesses in Europe to join a market dominated by American firms organizations like The Alcor Life Extension Foundation and The Cryonics Institute. The former cancer doctor has several hundred people on his firm's waiting list. They skew to their late 30s, male and tend to work in technology. Patients can choose to have their entire body preserved and held upside down in a four-person dewars, a thermos-like aluminum vat filled with liquid nitrogen, or just preserve their brain, which is cheaper.

Kendziorra says cryopreservation overall has become less expensive over the past few decades on an inflation-adjusted basis, a claim that he bases on historic prices published by his peers, who he says are making a collective effort to bring down costs. That could be critical to shifting cryonics from a fringe pursuit to something a little more mainstream, especially since it is no longer just for billionaires like PayPal Inc. co-founder Peter Thiel (who has reportedly signed up with Alcor). Kendziorra, for instance, has made cryonics just another monthly subscription by capitalizing on insurance, he told me during a Twitter Spaces discussion on cryonics last month. His customers pay a 25-euro ($26.54) monthly fee to Tomorrow Biostasis, and they also make the company the beneficiary of a minimum 100,000-euro life insurance payout upon their legal death. Kendziorra says that covers the full cost of cryonics including the biggest outlay: maintenance over the next century or so.

All told, most of his customers are paying about 50 euros a month for both the company's subscription fee and the life insurance policy for the option of a long sleep at death. Of course, most companies don't survive for more than a century, so Tomorrow Biostasis also partners with a non-profit group in Switzerland to carry out the storage of customers on its behalf.... The domain itself is largely funded by wealthy individuals including CEOs of tech companies, angel investors and scientists, Kendziorra says, adding that for them to invest in his own firm, their primary motivation shouldn't be "monetary" but rather to help further the field.

The mechanics all sound sensible, but that still leaves the question of whether cryonics will work, medically speaking. Doctors and scientists have used words like quackery, pseudoscience and outright fraud to describe the field. Clive Cohen, a neuroscientist from Kings College London, has called it a "hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology." The Association of Cryobiology has compared it to turning a hamburger back into a cow.

"Wheat now provides 20% of the calories consumed by humans every day," writes the Guardian. Unfortunately, "Thanks to human-induced global heating, our planet faces a future of increasingly severe heat waves, droughts and wildfires that could devastate harvests in future, triggering widespread famine in their wake.

"But the crisis could be averted thanks to remarkable research now being undertaken by researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich." They are working on a project to make wheat more resistant to heat and drought. Such efforts have proved to be extremely tricky but are set to be the subject of a new set of trials in a few weeks as part of a project in which varieties of wheat — created, in part, by gene-editing technology — will be planted in field trials in Spain. The ability of these varieties to withstand the heat of Iberia will determine how well crop scientists will be able to protect future arable farms from the worst vicissitudes of climate change, and so bolster food production for the Earth's billions, says the John Innes Centre team....

"A key tool in this work was gene editing, which allowed us to make precise changes in wheat DNA. Without it, we would still be struggling with this. It has made all the difference."
This was an especially difficult struggle because wheat genetics includes multiple ancestral genomes, the article points.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story.

"Aboard the International Space Station right now is a metal box, the size of a desktop PC tower," reports Popular Mechanics. "Inside, a nozzle is helping build little test parts that aren't possible to make on Earth."

The Washington Post reports: Backed by MIT's Space Exploration Initiative, astronauts on board the International Space Station on Friday completed a roughly 45-day experiment using a small microwave-sized box that injects resin into silicone skins to build parts, such as nuts and bolts. Now, after the parts travel back to Earth this weekend, scientists will evaluate the test pieces to examine whether they were made successfully — a process that could take weeks.

If so, it paves the way for astronauts to build huge parts that would be nearly impossible on Earth thanks to gravity and could upgrade space construction.It lets you build and modify space stations "quicker, cheaper and with less complexity," said Ariel Ekblaw, the founder of the Space Exploration Initiative. "It starts to unlock more opportunities for exploration."
The silicone skin is like a balloon filled with resin instead of air, an MIT engineer/researcher told Popular Science — with the resin then cured and solidified by a flash of ultraviolet light. (After which astronauts can cut away the silicone skin.)

The best part? The skin and the resin are both readily available off-the-shelf products.

Researchers have spent decades trying to figure out how ancient Romans were able to make concrete that's survived for two millennia. "Now, a team of investigators from MIT, Harvard University, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, has made progress in this field, discovering ancient concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated several key self-healing functionalities," reports MIT News. From the report: For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete's durability was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples. This specific kind of ash was even shipped all across the vast Roman empire to be used in construction, and was described as a key ingredient for concrete in accounts by architects and historians at the time. Under closer examination, these ancient samples also contain small, distinctive, millimeter-scale bright white mineral features, which have been long recognized as a ubiquitous component of Roman concretes. These white chunks, often referred to as "lime clasts," originate from lime, another key component of the ancient concrete mix.

Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability. [...] Upon further characterization of these lime clasts, using high-resolution multiscale imaging and chemical mapping techniques [...], the researchers gained new insights into the potential functionality of these lime clasts. Historically, it had been assumed that when lime was incorporated into Roman concrete, it was first combined with water to form a highly reactive paste-like material, in a process known as slaking. But this process alone could not account for the presence of the lime clasts. [MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering, Adam Masic] wondered: "Was it possible that the Romans might have actually directly used lime in its more reactive form, known as quicklime?"

Studying samples of this ancient concrete, he and his team determined that the white inclusions were, indeed, made out of various forms of calcium carbonate. And spectroscopic examination provided clues that these had been formed at extreme temperatures, as would be expected from the exothermic reaction produced by using quicklime instead of, or in addition to, the slaked lime in the mixture. Hot mixing, the team has now concluded, was actually the key to the super-durable nature. "The benefits of hot mixing are twofold," Masic says. "First, when the overall concrete is heated to high temperatures, it allows chemistries that are not possible if you only used slaked lime, producing high-temperature-associated compounds that would not otherwise form. Second, this increased temperature significantly reduces curing and setting times since all the reactions are accelerated, allowing for much faster construction."

During the hot mixing process, the lime clasts develop a characteristically brittle nanoparticulate architecture, creating an easily fractured and reactive calcium source, which, as the team proposed, could provide a critical self-healing functionality. As soon as tiny cracks start to form within the concrete, they can preferentially travel through the high-surface-area lime clasts. This material can then react with water, creating a calcium-saturated solution, which can recrystallize as calcium carbonate and quickly fill the crack, or react with pozzolanic materials to further strengthen the composite material. These reactions take place spontaneously and therefore automatically heal the cracks before they spread. Previous support for this hypothesis was found through the examination of other Roman concrete samples that exhibited calcite-filled cracks. According to MIT, the team is working to commercialize their modified cement material.

The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new Alzheimer's drug that may modestly slow the pace of cognitive decline early in the disease, but also carries risks of swelling and bleeding in the brain. From a report: The approval of the drug, lecanemab, to be marketed as Leqembi, is likely to generate considerable interest from patients and physicians. Studies of the drug -- an intravenous infusion administered every two weeks -- suggest it is more promising than the scant number of other treatments available. Still, several Alzheimer's experts said it was unclear from the medical evidence whether Leqembi could slow cognitive decline enough to be noticeable to patients.

Even a recent report of findings from a large 18-month clinical trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and co-written by scientists from the lead company making the drug, concluded that "longer trials are warranted to determine the efficacy and safety of lecanemab in early Alzheimer's disease." Eisai, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, led the development and testing of the drug. It is partnering with the American company Biogen, maker of the controversial Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm, for its commercialization and marketing, and the companies will split the profits equally. Eisai said the list price for Leqembi (pronounced le-KEM-bee) would be $26,500 per year. The price is slightly lower than Aduhelm's, but higher than that recommended by some analysts.

SonicSpike shares a report from Space.com: A giant cloud of magnetized plasma exploded from a sunspot hidden on the far side of the sun that might turn to face Earth only two days from now, so get ready for some solar fireworks. The explosion that erupted from behind the sun's eastern edge in the early morning of Tuesday (Jan. 3) was a so-called coronal mass ejection (CME), a burst of particles from the sun's upper atmosphere, or corona. The CME was accompanied by a powerful solar flare that lasted an overwhelming six hours, solar scientist Keith Strong said on Twitter. Neither the flare nor the CME were directed at Earth, but experts warn that the hidden sunspot that produced them will soon be facing the planet as the sun rotates.

Yesterday's flare and CME were detected by multiple sun-observing spacecraft including the joint NASA/European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory mission (SOHO) and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The measurements helped scientists to determine that the sunspot, or active region, that produced the bursts, will move to the Earth-facing portion of the sun's disk within two days, according to Space Weather. [...] The British space weather forecaster Met Office predicts low solar activity in the next couple of days with a potential increase expected toward the end of this week as the mysterious sunspot emerges at the sun's eastern edge.

South Korea's Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter spacecraft, known as Danuri, has sent back some high-resolution images from the moon. The Korea Aerospace Research Institute shared the views on Twitter this week. CNET reports: The first two come from late December and show the cratered landscape of the moon with Earth peeking above the horizon. The images are reminiscent of Earthrise views seen from NASA's Apollo and Artemis missions. KARI shared a second set of Earth images snapped during the new year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that causes particles to become weirdly linked, even across vast cosmic distances, reports a new study. The discovery allowed them to capture an unprecedented glimpse of the bizarre world inside atoms, the tiny building blocks of matter. The mind-bending research resolves a longstanding mystery about the nuclei of atoms, which contain particles called protons and neutrons, and could help shed light on topics ranging from quantum computing to astrophysics. The exciting discoveries took place at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a specialized facility at Brookhaven in New York that can accelerate charged atoms, known as ions, to almost light speed. When these ions collide -- or even just pass near each other -- their interactions expose the inner workings of atoms, which are governed by the trippy laws of quantum mechanics. [...]

Now, for the first time ever, scientists at Brookhaven have captured interference patterns that are created by the entanglement of two particles with different charges, a breakthrough that has opened up a completely new window into the mysterious innards of atoms that make up visible matter in the universe, according to a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances. "There's never been any measurement in the past of interference between distinguishable particles," said Daniel Brandenburg, a physics professor at the Ohio State University who co-authored the new study, in a call with Motherboard. "That's the discovery; the application is that we get to use it to do some nuclear physics." Brandenburg and his colleagues achieved this milestone with the help of a sensitive detector called the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC, or STAR, that captured interactions between gold ions that were boosted to the brink of light speed. Clouds of photons, which are particles that carry light, surround the ions and interact with another type of particle, called gluons, that hold atomic nuclei together. These encounters between the photons and the gluons set off a chain of events that ultimately created two new particles, called pions, which have opposite charges -- one positive and one negative. When these pions careened into the STAR detector, the precision instrument measured some of their key properties, such as velocity and angle of impact, which were then used to probe the size, shape, and arrangement of gluons inside the atomic nuclei with a precision that has never been achieved before.

Scientists have imaged atomic nuclei at lower energies before, but attempts to probe these structures at high energies has always produced a puzzling result. Nuclei in these experiments look way bigger than they should, according to models, an outcome that has puzzled scientists for decades. Now, the STAR collaboration has now solved this mystery by pinpointing a blurring effect that is linked to the photons in the experiment. Essentially, past studies captured one-dimensional glimpses of nuclei that did not account for important patterns in photons, such as their polarization direction. The new study included this polarization information, allowing Brandenburg and his colleagues to probe the nuclei from two angles, parallel and perpendicular to the photon's motion, producing a two-dimensional view that matches theoretical predictions. What's more, the team is even able to make out the rough positions of key particles in the nucleus, such as protons and neutrons, as well as the distribution of gluons. It also offers a new way to unravel persistent mysteries about the behavior of atoms at high energies. [...] Brandenburg hopes to repeat this technique, and versions of it, at RHIC and other facilities like the Large Hadron Collider, in order to tease out the long-hidden details inside atomic nuclei.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Askern Medical Practice, a general practitioner surgery based in Doncaster, UK, managed to muddle its Christmas holiday message to patients by texting them they'd been diagnosed with "aggressive lung cancer with metastases." The message went out to patients of the medical facility -- there are reportedly about 8,000 of them -- on December 23, 2022. It asked patients to fill out a DS1500 form, which is used to help terminal patients expedite access to benefits because they may not have time for the usual bureaucratic delay.

About an hour after thoroughly alarming recipients of the not-so-glad tidings, the medical facility reportedly apologized in a follow-up text message. "Please accept our sincere apologies for the previous text message sent," the message reads, as reported by the BBC. "This has been sent in error. Our message to you should have read, 'We wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.' In case of emergency please contact NHS 111." On Tuesday, the surgery took its apology public via its Facebook page. The surgery characterized the errant text message as both an administrative error and a computer-related error, without clarifying just how the mistake occurred. "While no data was breached, we can confirm an admin staff error was made, for which we apologized immediately upon becoming aware," Askern Medical Practice said in its post. "We would like to once again apologize sincerely to all patients for the distress caused. We take patient communication, confidentiality and data protection very seriously."

"We also pride in looking after our patients," the medical facility's apology continued. "We would like to reassure all our patients that the text message was a mistake (it was an internal patient supportive task amongst admin staff to act upon) and not related to you as a patient in any way. This was an isolated computer-related error for which we are extremely regretful, and steps are being taken to prevent a reoccurrence."

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will on Wednesday announce plans to force school pupils in England to study math up to the age of 18, according to a Downing Street briefing. The initiative attempts to tackle innumeracy and better equip young people for the workplace. CNBC reports: In his first speech of 2023, Sunak is expected to outline plans for math to be offered through alternative qualification routes. Comparatively, traditional A-Levels subject-based qualifications allow high school students in England to elect academic subjects to study between the ages of 16 and 18. [...] Sunak's education proposals would only affect pupils in England. Education is a devolved issue, with Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish authorities managing their own systems.

School-based education in England is only compulsory up to the age of 16, after which children can choose to pursue further academic qualifications such as A-Levels or alternative qualifications, or vocational training. The prime minister is expected to say in his Wednesday speech that the issue of mandatory math is "personal" for him. "Every opportunity I've had in life began with the education I was so fortunate to receive. And it's the single most important reason why I came into politics: to give every child the highest possible standard of education," he will say.

Sunak attended prestigious fee-paying institutions -- the Stroud School and Winchester College -- before studying at Oxford University. He is expected to acknowledge that the planned overhaul will be challenging and time consuming, with work beginning during the current parliamentary term and finishing in the next.

Better management of nitrogen-rich fertilisers through alternating crops, optimising use and other measures can yield huge environmental and health benefits, but must boost food production at the same time, researchers warned Wednesday. From a report: Reducing nitrogen pollution from global croplands is a "grand challenge," the group of international researchers said in a study in Nature outlining a dozen urgently-needed reforms. The intensive use of chemical fertilisers helped fuel the four-fold expansion of the human population over the last century, and will be crucial for feeding 10 billion people by 2050.

But the bumper crops of what was once called the Green Revolution have come at a terrible cost. Today, more than half the nitrogen in fertilisers seeps into the air and water, leading to deadly pollution, soil acidification, climate change, ozone depletion and biodiversity loss. "Given the multiple health, climate and environmental impacts of reactive nitrogen, it has to be reduced in all the mediums such as air and water," lead author Baojing Gu, a professor at Zhejiang University, told AFP. The benefits of doing so far outstrip the costs, he added.

The world is naturally awash in nitrogen, which is critical for the survival of all life on Earth, especially plants. Nearly 80 percent of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen, albeit in a gaseous form (N2) of little direct use to most organisms. It is made available to plants when microbes that live within plants or soils turn it into ammonia through biological nitrogen fixation. This process funnels some 200 million tonnes of nitrogen into the soil and oceans every year.

Walt Cunningham, one of the early Apollo astronauts, died Tuesday after complications from a fall. He was 90. NPR reports: Walt Cunningham flew in space just one time. His flight in 1968 was an important -- and often forgotten one -- for the lunar program. Cunningham was the lunar module pilot of the first manned Apollo mission that went to space. Apollo 7's 11-day trip around the Earth was a key stepping stone to NASA's march to the moon. "The real accomplishment, of course, was the first manned landing on the moon," Cunningham told NPR in 2016. "But that was the fifth of what I've always described as five giant steps. The first one was the Apollo 7 mission, of course. Complete test of the Apollo spacecraft."

The launch came after a difficult time for NASA. Just 21 months before, a fire on the launchpad killed three astronauts during a test of Apollo 1. In the interim, NASA changed many procedures and the command module underwent a series of safety improvements. Cunningham said in 2016 that if Apollo 7 had not gone well, the U.S. wouldn't have landed on the moon before the end of the 1960s. "Historically, what the public doesn't realize," he said, "It is still the longest, most ambitious, most successful first test flight of any new flying machine ever."

"There were so many things that had to be tested," he recalled. During the flight, the crew test-fired the engine that would place Apollo into and out of lunar orbit, simulated docking maneuvers and did the first-ever live television broadcast from an American spacecraft. "It was hard to imagine that we could get through all those things [in an 11-day mission] without something going wrong and saying, 'hey you need to gotta come home," Cunningham said. The mission was deemed a success but it was the last time these astronauts would fly in space. There was tension between Apollo 7's commander, Wally Schirra, and mission control. As the flight dragged on, Schirra caught a cold and so did astronaut Donn Eisele and the crew's squabbles worsened with ground controllers. Despite that, Cunningham said, "As I look back on it, it was a job, a challenge, and a task that in the end was very well done."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Immune therapies have rewritten the game when it comes to cancer treatment, earning the "fifth pillar" label next to more tried and true treatments like radiation therapy, surgery, and chemotherapy. And no immunotherapy has garnered quite the same excitement as CAR T-cell therapy, first approved in 2017 by the Food and Drug Administration to treat a form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. At the time, then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb called the approval "a new frontier in medical innovation," and it seemed like the possibilities for CAR T were near-endless. Flash-forward almost six years, and six therapies have been approved for blood cancers, including lymphomas, leukemia, and multiple myeloma. There's no question that when CAR T works, it works incredibly well. But why it doesn't work for the majority of patients or cancer types has befuddled researchers.

CAR T therapies also haven't yet been expanded to treat solid tumors, which make up the majority of cancers. The immune therapy hasn't been able to crack physical barriers, idiosyncratic tumor cells, and a suppressive microenvironment that characterize these cancers. But a new generation of CAR T therapies are emerging, equipped with highly effective small molecules that scientists hope will solve their low success rate for both blood cancers and solid tumors. Known as "armored CAR T," these infusions have been boosted with additional layers of protection and cancer-fighting proteins. Early research shows that the armored flavor of CAR T might have what it takes for immunotherapy to go the extra mile.

Briefly, immunotherapy can boost or restore the body's immune system by lowering cancer cells' defenses, priming the immune system's T cells to destroy tumors, or -- in the case of CAR T-cell therapy -- genetically editing a patient's T cells. Scientists do this by isolating a patient's T cells from their blood and inserting a gene for a chimeric antigen receptor -- a type of synthetic protein that has been specially made to bind to another protein present on the surface of that patient's cancer cells. Then, upon infusing these modified T cells back into a patient, the immune fighters will recognize and destroy the tumor cells when the patient's normal T cells have failed. That, at least, is the idea. But when CAR T doesn't work, a few factors could be at play. One, Lim said, is the tumor microenvironment, the set of chemicals and structures present in solid cancers that naturally suppress pushback from the body's immune system. Tumor heterogeneity is also a factor -- depending on the type and stage of cancer, tumor cells may not express the protein that the CAR T cells' receptors have been designed to recognize, blocking the ability of the CAR T cells to attack the cancer Finally, there are physical barriers on the outside of a solid tumor that can even prevent the T cells from entering inside to destroy the cancer. Armored CAR T is meant to overcome these difficulties. With this form of therapy, not only are T cells engineered to express a tumor cell's surface protein, they are also given potent cargo often in the form of small proteins called cytokines. If deployed on their own, such molecules can be toxic -- but pairing them with T cells designed to release them at the tumor site and nowhere else represents a promising new strategy. Jakub Svodoba, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania, "is helping to lead a clinical trial using armored CAR T-cell therapy to treat patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma for whom previous CAR T therapy has failed," reports the Daily Beast. "Last month, he presented findings that the first seven patients treated with this therapy all responded to it and were alive eight months after receiving it. Svoboda said an important additional finding was that toxicities experienced by the patients -- a concern with cytokines -- were comparable to those from traditional CAR T therapy."

Wendell Lim, a cellular and molecular pharmacology researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and his team are also working on an armored CAR-T therapy, with the potential for it to be used to treat solid tumors. "In a paper published in Science on Dec. 16, he and his colleagues designed T cells to release a cytokine directly to the tumors of mice with pancreatic cancer and melanoma," reports the Daily Beast. "In the study, they wrote that these cancers are 'nearly completely resistant' to treatment with traditional CAR T, but releasing a cytokine allowed the engineered T cells to get past the tumor microenvironment -- effectively solving one of the issues that has set the therapy back."