Analysis of thousands of tumours has unveiled a treasure trove of clues about the causes of cancer, representing a significant step towards the personalisation of treatment. The Guardian: Researchers say that for the first time it is possible to detect patterns -- called mutational signatures -- in the DNA of cancers. These provide clues including about whether a patient has had past exposure to environmental causes of cancer such as smoking or UV light, for example. This is important as these signatures allow doctors to look at each patient's tumour and match it to specific treatments and medications. However, these patterns can be detected only through analysis of the vast amounts of data unearthed by whole genome sequencing -- identifying the genetic makeup of a cell.

Deep underneath the Alps, on the Swiss-French border, something significant just happened in the world of physics. The Large Hadron Collider, Earth's most powerful particle accelerator, was restarted on Friday morning after a three-year hiatus for upgrades. From a report: Consisting of a ring 27 kilometers (16.7 miles) in circumference, the machine is made of superconducting magnets chilled to 271.3C (-456 F) -- which is colder than outer space. It works by smashing tiny particles together to allow scientists to observe them, and to see what's inside. It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but the revamped collider will ultimately allow mankind to observe dark matter, physicists hope. Back in 2011 the Large Hadron Collider, located 100 meters underground at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), helped scientists prove the existence of an subatomic particle called the Higgs boson -- which is thought to be a fundamental building block of the universe dating back to the Big Bang billions of years ago.

CERN said on its website that the collider magnets "squeeze" tiny particles causing them to crash together, which scientists then observe. These particles are so tiny, CERN said, that lining them up to smash together is "akin to firing two needles 10 kilometers apart with such precision that they meet halfway." Improvements to the collider mean scientists will be able to study the Higgs boson in "great detail," CERN said in a press release Friday. Now a team of experts hope to be able to collide yet more particles together with the aim of understanding the mysteries of dark matter -- an invisible and elusive mass that can't be seen because it doesn't absorb, reflect or emit any light.

China's largest city has recorded just 17 Covid deaths, despite surging cases. How China defines a Covid death may be part of the reason. The New York Times: By the numbers, Shanghai has been an exemplar of how to save lives during a pandemic. Despite the city's more than 400,000 Covid-19 infections, just 17 people have died, according to officials, statistics they have touted as proof that their strategy of strict lockdowns and mass quarantines works. But those numbers may not give a complete picture of the outbreak's toll. China typically classifies Covid-related deaths more narrowly than many other countries, labeling some chronically ill patients who die while infected as victims of those other conditions. In addition, a nearly three-week lockdown of China's biggest city has limited access to medicine and care for other illnesses. A nurse who suffered an asthma attack died after being denied care because of virus controls. A 90-year-old man died of complications from diabetes after being turned away from an overwhelmed hospital.

"If, at the time, he had been able to get treatment, he probably would have survived," said the man's granddaughter, Tracy Tang, a 32-year-old marketing manager. Residents and frontline workers have also been pushed to their limits by the policies. A hospital worker started bleeding internally after long hours conducting mass testing; she, too, died. It may never become clear how many similar stories there are. China does not release information on excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths -- from Covid as well as other causes -- exceeding the expected total in a given period. Public health scholars say that figure more accurately captures losses during the pandemic, as countries define Covid-related deaths differently. But as an example of the hidden impacts, a prominent Chinese physician recently estimated that nearly 1,000 more diabetes patients could die than expected during Shanghai's lockdown, urging the authorities to take a more measured response.

The outbreak there has revived questions about the true toll of Covid in China, which has officially reported fewer than 5,000 deaths from the coronavirus in two years. Beijing is unlikely to waver from its stringent approach. China's leader, Xi Jinping, has made the country's low death and infection rates central to his administration's legitimacy. Officials have been fired after even a few cases were detected in their jurisdictions. Last week, Mr. Xi said that "prevention and control work cannot be relaxed." The focus on minimizing Covid deaths risks incentivizing officials to neglect other causes of death, said Xi Chen, a professor of public health at Yale.

Shallow liquid water may be present on Jupiter's moon Europa, data based on the Greenland ice sheet suggests. The Independent reports: Europa is a prime candidate for life in the Solar System, and its deep saltwater ocean has captivated scientists for decades. The giant planet's moon has been visited by the Voyager and Galileo spacecrafts, and data collected on these missions, together with modeling, indicates the potential presence of a liquid water ocean beneath a 20-30km thick ice shell. While the thickness of the icy shell makes sampling it a daunting prospect, increasing evidence reveals the ice shell may be less of a barrier and more of a dynamic system -- and potentially good enough to support life in its own right.

Observations that captured the formation of a double ridge feature in Greenland suggest the ice shell of Europa may have an abundance of water pockets beneath similar features that are common on the surface. Study senior author Dustin Schroeder, an associate professor of geophysics at Stanford University's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth), said: "Because it's closer to the surface, where you get interesting chemicals from space, other moons and the volcanoes of Io, there's a possibility that life has a shot if there are pockets of water in the shell. If the mechanism we see in Greenland is how these things happen on Europa, it suggests there's water everywhere."

Double ridges on Europa appear as dramatic gashes across the moon's icy surface, with crests reaching nearly 1,000 feet. Study author Riley Culberg, a PhD student in electrical engineering at Stanford, said: "In Greenland, this double ridge formed in a place where water from surface lakes and streams frequently drains into the near-surface and refreezes. One way that similar shallow water pockets could form on Europa might be through water from the subsurface ocean being forced up into the ice shell through fractures -- and that would suggest there could be a reasonable amount of exchange happening inside of the ice shell." The researchers describe their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A team of mechanical engineers at MIT recently developed an "Oreometer" to test the optimal way of separating the two halves of an Oreo cookie, so that the wafers and the creme filling inside remained unbroken. It was an exercise in rheology, or the study of how matter flows. (They called this particular experiment "Oreology.") The fluid in this case was the creme filling, a soft solid that the team classified as "mushy," meaning it's not very brittle (unlike a cracker) and is relatively soft (like bread). The team built their Oreometer to test how different types of Oreos separate, paying particular attention to the creme distribution across the two wafers once the cookie split. Their research is published today in Physics of Fluids.

"Our favorite twist was rotating while pulling Oreos apart from one side, as a kind of peel-and-twist, which was the most reliable for getting a very clean break," said Crystal Owens, a mechanical engineer at MIT and the lead author of the new paper, in an email to Gizmodo. "Peeling is intuitively well-known to cause adhesive failure, like when you want to remove a sticker from a surface without tearing the sticker itself." [...] The researchers found that the creme would often stay on one side of the wafers ("Wafer 1") rather than the other, which they believe is a result of how the Oreos are manufactured. They tested regular Oreos as well as the Double and Mega Stuf varieties, which have more creme filling, and didn't report any apparent correlation between the amount of creme and how cleanly the cookie separated. The team made the Oreometer design open source, so anyone can build their own device and collect data on Oreo separation and shear. Fry would be proud.

The United States government has committed to ending the practice of anti-satellite missile tests, Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Monday, urging other nations to follow its lead. From a report: An anti-satellite weapons, or ASAT, test is a military demonstration in which a spacecraft in orbit is destroyed using a missile system. Countries performing ASAT tests historically have done so by targeting their own assets in space. Plans for the move were set late last year, after the Russian military destroyed a defunct satellite with an ASAT on Nov. 15. The Russian test created thousands of pieces of debris in low Earth orbit, and sent astronauts on the International Space Station into shelter as it passed through the shrapnel field.

During Harris' first meeting in December as chair of the National Space Council, the vice president directed the group to work with other agencies and create proposals that would establish new national security norms in space. The U.S. ASAT commitment, which coincides with Harris' tour of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Tuesday, marks the first step of that effort. The White House stressed that "the United States is the first nation to make such a declaration" to end such testing.

In 2021, a team of hologram doctors was "holoported" to space to visit astronauts living aboard the International Space Station, NASA has revealed in a new post. Space.com reports: The hologram teams, led by NASA flight surgeon Dr. Josef Schmid and Fernando De La Pena Llaca, CEO of software provider Aexa Aerospace, were the first humans to ever be "holoported" from Earth to space. "This is completely new manner of human communication across vast distances," Schmid said in the statement. "Furthermore, it is a brand-new way of human exploration, where our human entity is able to travel off the planet. Our physical body is not there, but our human entity absolutely is there."

"It doesn't matter that the space station is traveling 17,500 mph [28,000 kilometers per hour] and in constant motion in orbit 250 miles [400 km] above Earth, the astronaut can come back three minutes or three weeks later and with the system running, we will be there in that spot, live on the space station," Schmid added. The medical teams holoported to the station on Oct. 8. Using the Microsoft Hololens Kinect camera and a personal computer with custom Aexa software, European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who was on board the station at that time, had a holo-conversation with Schmid and De La Pena's teams. The holograms of the doctors were visible live in the middle of the space station.

So how did it work? The "holoportation" technology that enabled this event works using specialized image capture technology that reconstructs, compresses and transmits live 3D models of people. This technology couples with the HoloLens, a self-described "mixed reality headset" that combines sensors, optics and holographic processing tech to allow the wearer to see the hologram images or even enter a "virtual world." With the two systems combined, users in orbit can not only see hologram participants, but can also hear and interact with them. The technology is not new, but has never been used in an environment this challenging with users so far apart.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: The longest journey begins with a single step, and that step gets expensive when you're in the space business. Take, for example, the Electron booster made by Rocket Lab, a company with two launch pads on the New Zealand coast and another awaiting use in Virginia. [...] If all goes well, its next flight, currently targeted for 22 April, will carry 34 commercial satellites -- and instead of being dropped in the Pacific, the spent first stage will be snared in midair by a helicopter as it descends by parachute. The helicopter will then fly it back to base, seared by the heat of reentry but inwardly intact, for possible refurbishment and reuse.

"It's a very complex thing to do," says Morgan Bailey of Rocket Lab. "You have to position the helicopter in exactly the right spot, you have to know exactly where the stage is going to be coming down, you have to be able to slow it enough," she says. "We've practiced and practiced all of the individual puzzle pieces, and now it's putting them together. It's not a foregone conclusion that the first capture attempt will be a success." Still, people in the space business will be watching, since Rocket Lab has established a niche for itself as a viable space company. This will be its 26th Electron launch. The company says it has launched 112 satellites so far, many of them so-called smallsats that are relatively inexpensive to fly. "Right now, there are two companies taking payloads to orbit: SpaceX and Rocket Lab," says Chad Anderson, CEO of Space Capital, a firm that funds space startups.

Beacon of Galaxy message could be sent into heart of Milky Way, where life is deemed most likely to exist. From a report: "Even if the aliens are short, dour and sexually obsessed," the late cosmologist Carl Sagan once mused, "if they're here, I want to know about them." Driven by the same mindset, a Nasa-led team of international scientists has developed a new message that it proposes to beam across the galaxy in the hope of making first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. The interstellar missive, known as the Beacon in the Galaxy, opens with simple principles for communication, some basic concepts in maths and physics, the constituents of DNA, and closes with information about humans, the Earth, and a return address should any distant recipients be minded to reply.

The group of researchers, headed by Dr Jonathan Jiang at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, says that with technical upgrades the binary message could be broadcast into the heart of the Milky Way by the Seti Institute's Allen Telescope Array in California and the 500-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in China. In a preliminary paper, which has not been peer reviewed, the scientists recommend sending the message to a dense ring of stars near the centre of the Milky Way -- a region deemed most promising for life to have emerged.

"Humanity has, we contend, a compelling story to share and the desire to know of others -- and now has the means to do so," the scientists write. The message, if it ever leaves Earth, would not be the first. The Beacon in the Galaxy is loosely based on the Arecibo message sent in 1974 from an observatory of the same name in Puerto Rico. That targeted a cluster of stars about 25,000 light years away, so it will not arrive any time soon. Since then, a host of messages have been beamed into the heavens including an advert for Doritos and an invitation, written in Klingon, to a Klingon Opera in The Hague.

Three Chinese astronauts, also known as taikonauts, safely returned to Earth yesterday after spending six months aboard China's unfinished Tiangong space station, according to a report from Space.com. This is China's second crewed mission to Tiangong and its longest so far. From a report: The Shenzhou 13 spacecraft landed in the Inner Mongolia desert at 9:56AM local time on Saturday morning after departing from the space station's core Tianhe module about nine hours prior. The crew took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert last October and spent a total of 183 days on the space station. This mission is China's longest.

In addition, taikonaut Wang Yaping made history as the first Chinese woman to visit the Tianhe space station and also became the first Chinese woman to conduct a spacewalk. Wang was accompanied by crewmate Ye Guangfu and commander Zhai Zhigang. The trio carried out a total of two spacewalks, performed various tests around the station, and held two live lectures for students watching from Earth. Shenzhou 13 is part of 11 missions China has planned to finish constructing the Tiangong space station. China first launched the Tianhe module in April 2021 and later sent three taikonauts to bring the station online. As noted by Space.com, the Shenzhou 14 crew is set to depart for the space station sometime in June. China plans on having the station finished by the end of the year, which will include the launch of two additional modules.

"Astronomers have discovered a dusty, red object 13 billion light-years from Earth that may be the earliest known ancestor of a supermassive black hole," reports Live Science: The ancient object shows characteristics that fall between dusty, star-forming galaxies and brightly glowing black holes known as quasars, according to the authors of a new study, published April 13 in the journal Nature. Born just 750 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called the "cosmic dawn," the object appears to be the first direct evidence of an early galaxy weaving stardust into the foundations of a supermassive black hole.

Objects like these, known as transitioning red quasars, have been theorized to exist in the early universe, but they have never been observed — until now....

Prior research has shown that quasars existed within the first 700 million years of the universe, the study authors wrote; however, it's unclear exactly how these supermassive objects formed so quickly after the Big Bang. Simulations suggest that some sort of fast-growing transition phase occurs in dusty, star-dense galaxies. "Theorists have predicted that these black holes undergo an early phase of rapid growth: a dust-reddened compact object emerges from a heavily dust-obscured starburst galaxy," study co-author Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, said in the statement. In their new paper, the researchers claim to have detected one of these rare transitional objects — officially named GNz7q — while studying an ancient, star-forming galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The team caught the early galaxy in the midst of a stellar baby boom, with the galaxy seemingly churning out new stars 1,600 times faster than the Milky Way does today. All those newborn stars produced an immense amount of heat, which warmed the galaxy's ambient gas and caused it to glow brightly in infrared wavelengths. The galaxy became so hot, in fact, that its dust shines brighter than any other known object from the cosmic dawn period, the researchers said. Amid that brightly glowing dust, the researchers detected a single red point of light — a large, compact object tinged by the enormous fog of dust around it. According to the researchers, this red dot's luminosity and color perfectly match the predicted characteristics of a transitioning red quasar....

[T]here are likely many, many others like it just waiting to be discovered by telescopes that can peer even further back, into the earliest eras of the universe. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which launched on Dec. 25, 2021, will be able to hunt for these elusive objects with much greater clarity than Hubble, the researchers wrote, hopefully shedding a bit more light onto the dusty cosmic dawn.

"It was one of the most eagerly awaited scientific announcements of all time, and it pitted the world of faith against the world of rational thought, under the glare of the media," remembers the Guardian. So when cutting-edge carbon-14 tests found that the Shroud of Turin was a forgery, it seemed like the final chapter for a relic that had been revered for centuries as the cloth in which Christ's body had been wrapped when he supposedly rose from the dead at the first Easter almost 2,000 years ago.

But one man — David Rolfe, a film-maker whose documentary The Silent Witness had brought the shroud into the public eye in modern times, and who had converted to Christianity as a result of his research — wasn't prepared to give up on it. He was convinced the carbon dating, carried out in 1988 under the direction of the British Museum and Oxford University, had been flawed. And now he claims he has the evidence to prove it. This week sees the release of a new film, Who Can He Be?, in which Rolfe argues that, far from the shroud being a definite dud, new discoveries in the past few years have again opened the question of its authenticity. So convinced is Rolfe that he's issuing a challenge worth $1m to the British Museum. "If ... they believe the shroud is a medieval forgery, I call on them to repeat the exercise, and create something similar today," he says....

The sample used for the tests, Rolfe argues in his new film, was too small and taken from a corner where the shroud was likely to have been repaired over the centuries....

When it comes to the carbon dating, he's certainly not alone in his scepticism. Barrie M Schwortz, a photographer who documented the shroud in 1978, says "murky" would be a good word to describe the events of 1988. "Today there are at least six peer-reviewed scientific articles that challenge the results of the carbon dating," he says. In his view, the players involved were in a hurry to get the job done, because they wanted to get carbon dating on the map. "Those tests made it a household name, and today it's used widely in archaeology," he says....

The British Museum is less willing to get involved this time around. "Any current questions about the shroud would be best put to those who currently care for it in the royal chapel of the cathedral of Turin," a spokesperson said.

"After three attempts to complete a critical fueling test of the Space Launch System rocket, NASA has decided to take a break," reports Ars Technica: On Saturday night the space agency announced plans to roll the large SLS rocket from the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center to the Vehicle Assembly Building in the coming days. This marks a notable step back for the program, which has tried since April 1 to complete a "wet dress rehearsal" test, during which the rocket is fueled and brought to within 10 seconds of launch. The decision comes after three tries during the last two weeks. Each fueling attempt was scuttled by one or more technical issues with the rocket, its mobile launch tower, or ground systems that supply propellants and gases. During the most recent attempt, on Thursday April 14, NASA succeeded in loading 49 percent of the core-stage liquid oxygen fuel tank and 5 percent of the liquid hydrogen tank. [NASA reports that the team ended the test after "observing a liquid hydrogen leak on the tail service mast umbilical."]

While this represents progress, it did not include the most dynamic portion of the test, during which the rocket is fully fueled and pressurized; and it, the ground systems, and computer systems are put into a terminal countdown when every variable is closely monitored. NASA had hoped to complete this wet dress rehearsal test to work out the kinks in the complicated launch system so that, when the rocket is rolled out later this year for its actual launch, the countdown will proceed fairly smoothly. NASA said that its contractors, as well as its agency's, will use the next several weeks to address problems that cropped up during the fueling tests when the SLS rocket returns to the large Vehicle Assembly Building. For example, gaseous nitrogen system supplier Air Liquide will upgrade its capabilities. NASA will also replace a faulty check valve on the upper stage of the rocket, as well as fix a leak on the mobile launch tower's "tail service mast umbilical," a 10-meter-tall structure that provides propellant and electricity lines to the rocket on the pad....

Still, NASA seems confident that it will get through this painful teething process for the SLS rocket: a program that is now 11 years old and in which NASA has invested more than $30 billion in the rocket and ground systems now being tested. "There's no doubt in my mind that we will finish this test campaign, and we will listen to the hardware, and the data will lead us to the next step," Blackwell-Thompson said Friday. "And we will take the appropriate steps, and we will launch this vehicle. I don't know exactly what that date is, but there's no doubt in my mind that we'll finish the test campaign, and we will be ready to go fly."

"The U.S. Space Command announced this week that it determined a 2014 meteor hit that hit Earth was from outside the solar system," reports CBS News. "The meteor streaked across the sky off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea three years earlier than what was believed to be the first confirmed interstellar object detected entering our solar system."

After Oumuamua was spotted in 2017, the interstellar comet Borisov appeared in 2019 — discovered in Crimea, Ukraine at a "personal observatory" built by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov"

But CBS notes that despite their theory about a first interstellar meteor in 2014, the two Harvard astronomers — Dr. Amir Siraj and Dr. Abraham Loeb — "had trouble getting their paper published, because they used classified information from the government." Specifically, data from a classified U.S. government satellite designed to detect foreign missiles... The meteor was unusual because of its very high speed and unusual direction — which suggested it came from interstellar space.... Any space object traveling more than about 42 kilometers per second may come from interstellar space. The data showed the 2014 Manus Island fireball hit the Earth's atmosphere at about 45 kilometers per second, which was "very promising" in identifying it as interstellar, Siraj said....

After more research and help from other scientists, including classified information from the government about the accuracy or level of precision of the data, Siraj and Loeb determined with 99.999% certainty the object was interstellar. But their paper on the finding was being turned down, because the pair only had a private conversation with an anonymous U.S. government employee to confirm the accuracy of the data.
"We had thought this was a lost cause," Dr. Siraj told the New York Times — which couldn't resist adding that "it turned out, the truth was out there." Last month, the U.S. Space Command released a memo to NASA scientists that stated the data from the missile warning satellites' sensors "was sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory" for the meteor. The publication of the memo was the culmination of a three-year effort by Siraj and a well-known Harvard astronomer, Avi Loeb.

Many scientists, including those at NASA, say that the military still has not released enough data to confirm the interstellar origins of the space rock, and a spokesperson said Space Command would defer to other authorities on the question.

But it wasn't the only information about meteors to be released. The military also handed NASA decades of secret military data on the brightness of hundreds of other fireballs, or bolides. "It's an unusual degree of visibility of a set of data coming from that world," said Matt Daniels, assistant director for space security at the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, who worked on the data release. "We're in this renewed period of excitement and activity in space programs generally, and in the midst of that, I think thoughtful leaders in multiple places said, 'you know, now is a good time to do this.'"
The Times notes that data from classified military satellites "could also aid NASA in its federally assigned role as defender of planet Earth from killer asteroids. And that is the goal of a new agreement with the U.S. Space Force that aims to help NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office better understand what happens when space rocks reach the atmosphere." Sharing sensitive military satellite data with astronomers has led to significant scientific discoveries in the past.

A group of satellites deployed in the 1960s by the United States to detect covert detonations of nuclear weapons on Earth accidentally became the key instruments used to make the first detection of extraterrestrial gamma ray bursts. The bursts showed up on the satellites, code-named Vela, as single bursts of energy, confusing analysts at Los Alamos who later declassified the data in a 1973 paper that spurred academic debate about the bursts' origins....

A core reason for Space Force's increasing ties with NASA has centered on the agency's congressional mandate to detect nearly all asteroids that could threaten the Earth. When NASA signed an agreement in 2020 to strengthen ties with Space Force, the agency acknowledged it had fallen behind in its asteroid-tracking efforts and would need Pentagon resources to carry out its planetary defense mission.

The Covid-19 pandemic "would look very different if scientists had been able to develop a treatment sooner," writes Bill Gates, in a guest essay Friday in the New York Times. This ultimately would've reduced fatalities — "and it may have been harder for myths and misinformation to spread the way they did."

But note that Gates said "treatment" — not vaccine. Gates believes most people in the public health community had expected an effective treatment would appear before vaccines became available. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. Safe, effective Covid vaccines were available within a year — a historic feat — but treatments that could keep large numbers of people out of the hospital were surprisingly slow out of the gate....

In late 2021, a few of their efforts paid off — not as soon as would have been ideal, but still in time to have a big impact. Merck and its partners developed an antiviral called molnupiravir, which was shown to significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization or death for people at high risk. Soon after, another oral antiviral, Paxlovid, made by Pfizer, also proved to be very effective, reducing the risk of severe illness or death by nearly 90 percent among high-risk, unvaccinated adults. These drugs are useful tools for combating the pandemic, but they arrived much later than they should have and, for many, they are still difficult to access....

It's a mistake to think of vaccines as the star of the show and therapeutics as the opening act you would just as soon skip. We're lucky that scientists made Covid vaccines as quickly as they did — if they hadn't, the death toll would be far worse. But in the event of another pandemic, even if the world is able to develop a vaccine for a new pathogen in 100 days, it will still take a long time to get the vaccine to most of the population.... With good therapeutics, the risk of severe illness and death could drop significantly, and countries could decide to loosen restrictions on schools and businesses, reducing the disruption to education and the economy. What's more, imagine how people's lives would change if we're able to take the next step by linking testing and treatment. Anyone with early symptoms that might indicate Covid (or any other viral disease) could walk into a pharmacy or clinic anywhere in the world, get tested and, if positive for the virus, walk out with antivirals to take at home....

In short, although therapeutics didn't rescue us from Covid, they hold a lot of promise for saving lives and preventing future outbreaks from crippling health systems. But to make the most of that promise, the world needs to invest in the research and systems we'll need to find treatments much faster. That's why my foundation has supported a therapeutics accelerator at Duke University, but broader initiatives will be necessary to make lasting change. This will require substantial investment to bring together academia, industry and the latest software tools. But if we succeed, the next time the world faces an outbreak, we'll save millions more lives.
Gates offers several specific recommendations — including "investing in large libraries of drug compounds that researchers can quickly scan to see whether existing therapies work against new pathogens." And... With advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, it's now possible to use computers to identify weak spots on pathogens that we already know about, and we'll be able to do the same when new pathogens arise. These technologies are also speeding up the search for new compounds that will attack those weak spots. With adequate funding, various groups could take the most promising new compounds through Phase 1 studies even before there's an epidemic, or at least have several leads that can be turned into a product quickly once we know what the target looks like.

Sometimes making a brand-new type of box requires outside-the-box thinking, which is exactly what Spartan chemists used to create an eight-atom, magnetic cube. Phys.Org reports: Part of what made the researchers' idea so wild was their choice to work with starting ingredients that are notoriously finicky in the chemistry community. One ingredient is a group of elements referred to as lanthanides, which occupy a special row toward the bottom of the periodic table of elements. The other is the metallic element bismuth, which doesn't typically get too much attention (although some may recognize it from its role in bright pink antacids such as Pepto Bismol).

By finding a way to combine the bismuth with a lanthanide element -- notably terbium or dysprosium -- they created a molecule with permanent magnetic features. It's the same magnetism found in bar magnets and hard disk drives, but at a much smaller scale. The small scale of molecular magnets offers technological opportunities, such as improving the storage capacity of magnetic hard drives. There are also emerging applications where conventional magnets may simply be too large to contribute, such as in processors for quantum computers.

The first single-molecule magnet was discovered about 30 years ago and, since then, researchers have been seeking new varieties with different physical and chemical attributes. They've also been working to develop more creative chemical approaches to make the magnets. The molecule itself, though, looks simple, belying the complexity of the process required to make it. The top and bottom of the molecule are capped with rings of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Each ring is linked to a lanthanide that forms a cube with the bismuth atoms. The researchers published their findings in the journal Chem.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by scientists. NPR reports: The nucleus of comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is about 80 miles in diameter, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island, NASA says. The comet's nucleus is about 50 times larger than that of most comets, and its mass is estimated to be a gigantic 500 trillion tons.

Comet C/2014 UN271 was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein using archival images from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The comet has been observed since 2010, when it was 3 billion miles away from the sun, and has been studied since then. NASA says there was a challenge in measuring the comet's nucleus because it was too far away for the Hubble telescope to determine its size. Instead, scientists had to make a computer model that was adjusted to fit the images of the comet's bright light that they got from the telescope's data.

Despite traveling at 22,000 mph, the massive comet is still coming from the edge of the solar system. But NASA assures us that it will never get closer than 1 billion miles away from the sun -- and even then, that won't be until 2031. The previous record-holder for largest comet nucleus was discovered in 2002. Comet C/2002 VQ94 was approximately 60 miles across.

NASA has signed up to test SpinLaunch's extraordinary whirl 'n' hurl space launch technology, which accelerates a launch vehicle to hypersonic speeds using an electric centrifuge instead of a rocket, hurling it skyward like a space discus. New Atlas reports: The idea behind SpinLaunch is as staggering as the company's name is appropriate. The idea of winding up and throwing satellites most of the way into orbit just boggles the mind. But in initial testing, this company's kinetic launch system, which looks externally a lot like a turbocharger, has shown promise as an environmentally-friendly, and potentially cost-effective replacement for first-stage rocket launches. [T]he company says it'll be appropriate for smaller launch vehicles weighing up to about 440 lb (200 kg), carrying ultra-ruggedized satellites capable of dealing with the forces involved. The SpinLaunch system will do the first part, flinging them high into the air, where a second-stage rocket can take over and give them the final push into orbit.

And the advantages are pretty compelling. SpinLaunch says that eliminating the first-stage rocket from the launch vehicle will cut out some 70 percent of the fuel and structures needed by a traditional launch vehicle, and that it can get appropriate loads into orbit using a quarter of the fuel, and at a tenth of the price. NASA is one of many parties interested in this possibility, and it's now signed a Space Act agreement with SpinLaunch to develop and integrate a NASA payload for this kinetic launch system, which will be flung skyward from Spaceport America, New Mexico, in a test flight later this year.

This, like all SpinLaunch "regular" test flights to date, will be a slower sub-orbital launch with a speed closer to 1,000 mph (1,600 km/h, Mach 1.3) than 5,000 mph. The payload will be designed to take a range of measurements, which will be analyzed by both groups. All non-proprietary information learned from this test will be published, and SpinLaunch says it's working towards its first orbital launch in 2025. A render posted late last year by SpinLaunch shows how their system works.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Researchers have rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman's skin cells so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-old's. [...] The scientists in Cambridge believe that they can do the same thing with other tissues in the body. The head of the team, Prof Wolf Reik, of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, told BBC News that he hoped that the technique could eventually be used to keep people healthier for longer as they grow older. [...] Prof Reich stressed though that the work, which has been published in the journal eLife, was at a very early stage. He said that there were several scientific issues to overcome before it could move out of his lab and into the clinic. But he said that demonstrating for the first time that cell rejuvenation is possible was a critical step forward.

Prof Reik's team used [a method, called iPS, that involves adding chemicals to adult cells to turn them into stem cells] on 53-year-old skin cells. But they cut short the chemical bath from 50 days to around 12. Dr Dilgeet Gill was astonished to find that the cells had not turned into embryonic stem cells -- but had rejuvenated into skin cells that looked and behaved as if they came from a 23-year old. He said: "I remember the day I got the results back and I didn't quite believe that some of the cells were 30 years younger than they were supposed to be. It was a very exciting day!"

The technique cannot immediately be translated to the clinic because the iPS method increases the risk of cancers. But Prof Reik was confident that now it was known that it is possible to rejuvenate cells, his team could find an alternative, safer method. "The long-term aim is to extend the human health span, rather than the lifespan, so that people can get older in a healthier way," he said. Prof Reik says some of the first applications could be to develop medicines to rejuvenate skin in older people in parts of the body where they have been cut or burned -- as a way to speed up healing. The researchers have demonstrated that this is possible in principle by showing that their rejuvenated skin cells move more quickly in experiments simulating a wound. The next step is to see if the technology will work on other tissues such as muscle, liver and blood cells.

A new immunotherapy that targets cells infected with Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) has halted the progression of multiple sclerosis (MS) in a small trial. Perhaps even more incredibly, in some patients, it is possible that symptoms of MS were actually reversed, though this was not fully identified in the most recent presentation of results (PDF). IFLScience reports: [S]ignificant evidence has linked infection of EBV and the eventual development of MS. [...] Attempting to "transform treatment of Multiple Sclerosis," Atara Biotherapeutics has developed an allogeneic T-cell therapy called ATA188. The concept is simple -- when cells are infected with EBV, they express small proteins called antigens on the cell surface, and the immunotherapy contains immune cells that target and destroy them.

In a trial of 24 patients who received the therapy, 20 saw improvements or stability in their symptoms and no fatal or serious adverse effects were reported. Early brain scans suggest that some damaged nerve cells may have been "repaired" by the therapy in a process called remyelination, which could mean a reversal of damage caused by MS in the nervous system, but this has not yet been confirmed. While the results are extremely promising, it is an early Phase 1 trial with a small sample size and no placebo or control group, so it is unclear whether the results are significant at this stage. However, it is unlikely that this repair would occur naturally, suggesting the therapy is having a beneficial effect on some level.