Biopharmaceutical company MindMed has announced the first topline data from a novel Phase 2 trial testing high doses of LSD as a treatment for anxiety. The results indicate one to two LSD sessions can generate rapid and sustained reductions to anxiety, however, significantly larger trials will be needed to validate these findings. New Atlas reports: This new trial was conducted at University Hospital Basel in Switzerland. The trial was randomized, and placebo-controlled with a crossover design enrolling 46 participants. The participants completed two high-dose (200-microgram) LSD sessions, six weeks apart. The primary endpoint was a reduction in anxiety 16 weeks after the second LSD session, as measured on a scale called STAI (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory), a common test used to quantify anxiety.

The data revealed by MindMed indicates 65 percent (13 out of 20) patients in the LSD group demonstrated a clinically significant reduction in STAI scores of more than 30 percent. Only nine percent of the placebo group (two out of 22) showed similar clinical improvements. The results indicate the treatment was generally safe with only mild adverse effects reported by most subjects. The announcement did report one serious adverse treatment event during an LSD session described as "acute transient anxiety and delusions." This subject required sedatives but no long-term adverse effects were noted. [...] MindMed is now beginning a Phase 2b trial to expand on these findings and further explore LSD as a treatment for anxiety disorders.

Virgin Orbit is assembling a fleet of modified 747 jets, the company announced Tuesday, ordering two new modified cargo airframes to help launch more rockets into space. CNBC reports: The company is acquiring the two additional airframes through L3Harris, which will modify the jets to carry and launch Virgin Orbit's rockets. Virgin expects to take delivery of the first of the planes next year. Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart said the delivery timing of the second plane will be "driven more by market demand" for launches. The deal "unleashes us in a few ways," he said. "It eliminates one of the key chokepoints that we have in the system," Hart told CNBC. It also will help the company keep launches going in case one of their aircraft is undergoing maintenance, which will open up "all sorts of possibilities for supporting different customers in different places," he added.

Virgin Orbit has a single aircraft, a customized Boeing 747-400 called "Cosmic Girl," which has flown four missions of Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rocket to date. Through a method known as air launch, the company's aircraft carries its rockets to about 45,000 feet of altitude and drops them just before they fire their engines and accelerate into space -- a method the company touts as more flexible than ground-based systems. [...] Virgin Orbit's new 747s will also feature an improved layout, with L3Harris modifying the aircraft to carry up to two LauncherOne rockets, as well as all of the company's ground support equipment, to a launch site.

The prospect of growing crops on the moon has edged a little closer after researchers nurtured plants -- some more successfully than others -- in lunar soil for the first time. From a report: Scientists planted thale cress seeds in moon dust brought back by three Apollo missions and watched them sprout and grow into fully fledged plants, raising the potential for astronauts to farm off-world crops. But while the plants survived in the lunar soil, or regolith, they fell short of thriving, growing more slowly than cress planted in volcanic ash, developing stunted roots, and showing clear signs of physiological stress.

"We found that plants do indeed grow in lunar regolith, however they respond as if they are growing in a stressful situation," said Dr Anna-Lisa Paul, a molecular biologist at the University of Florida. Thale cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana, is a small flowering plant related to broccoli, cauliflower and kale. "It's not especially tasty," Paul added. The experiments are the first to investigate whether plants can grow in lunar soil and follow an 11-year effort to obtain the rare material. Because the soil is so precious, Nasa loaned only 12g of it -- a few teaspoons -- to the researchers who conducted the tests. Scientists have long wondered whether the moon could support crops, but with space agencies now planning to return humans to the surface, and potentially build lunar settlements for visitors, the question has become more pressing.

Astronomers announced today that they had pierced the veil of darkness and dust at the center of our Milky Way galaxy to capture the first picture of "the gentle giant" dwelling there: A supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of 4 million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and a violently bent space-time. From a report: The image, released in six simultaneous news conferences in Washington, D.C., and around the globe, showed a lumpy doughnut of radio emission framing an empty space as dark and silent as death itself. The new image joins the first ever picture of a black hole, produced in 2019 by the same team, which photographed the monster at the heart of the M87. The new image shows new details of the astrophysical violence and gravitational weirdness holding sway at the center of our placid-looking hive of starlight.

Black holes were an unwelcome consequence of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which attributes gravity to the warping of space and time by matter and energy, much as a mattress sags under a sleeper. Einstein's insight led to a new conception of the cosmos, in which space-time could quiver, bend, rip, expand, swirl and even disappear forever into the maw of a black hole, an entity with gravity so strong that not even light could escape it. Einstein disapproved of this idea, but the universe is now known to be speckled with black holes. Many are the remains of dead stars that collapsed inward on themselves and just kept going. But there seems to be a black hole at the center of nearly every galaxy, ours included, that can be millions or billions of times as massive than our sun. Astronomers still do not understand how these supermassive black holes have grown so big.

Using anti-inflammatory drugs and steroids to relieve pain could increase the chances of developing chronic pain, according to researchers from McGill University and colleagues in Italy. Neuroscience News reports: Their research puts into question conventional practices used to alleviate pain. Normal recovery from a painful injury involves inflammation and blocking that inflammation with drugs could lead to harder-to-treat pain. [...] In the study published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers examined the mechanisms of pain in both humans and mice. They found that neutrophils -- a type of white blood cell that helps the body fight infection -- play a key role in resolving pain. Experimentally blocking neutrophils in mice prolonged the pain up to ten times the normal duration. Treating the pain with anti-inflammatory drugs and steroids like dexamethasone and diclofenac also produced the same result, although they were effective against pain early on.

These findings are also supported by a separate analysis of 500,000 people in the United Kingdom that showed that those taking anti-inflammatory drugs to treat their pain were more likely to have pain two to ten years later, an effect not seen in people taking acetaminophen or anti-depressants. "Our findings suggest it may be time to reconsider the way we treat acute pain. Luckily pain can be killed in other ways that don't involve interfering with inflammation," says Massimo Allegri, a Physician at the Policlinico of Monza Hospital in Italy and Ensemble Hospitalier de la Cote in Switzerland.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: It's not every day that someone comes across a new state of matter in quantum physics, the scientific field devoted to describing the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles in order to elucidate their properties. Yet this is exactly what an international team of researchers that includes Andrea Bianchi, University of Montreal physics professor and researcher at the Regroupement quebecois sur les materiaux de pointe, and his students Avner Fitterman and Jeremi Dudemaine has done. In a recent article published in the scientific journalPhysical Review X, the researchers document a "quantum spin liquid ground state" in a magnetic material created in Bianchi's lab: Ce2Zr2O7, a compound composed of cerium, zirconium and oxygen. In quantum physics, spin is an internal property of electrons linked to their rotation. It is spin that gives the material in a magnet its magnetic properties.
[...]
Ce2Zr2O7 is a cerium-based material with magnetic properties. "The existence of this compound was known," said Bianchi. "Our breakthrough was creating it in a uniquely pure form. We used samples melted in an optical furnace to produce a near-perfect triangular arrangement of atoms and then checked the quantum state." It was this near-perfect triangle that enabled Bianchi and his team at UdeM to create magnetic frustration in Ce2Zr2O7. Working with researchers at McMaster and Colorado State universities, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex System in Dresden, Germany, they measured the compound's magnetic diffusion. "Our measurements showed an overlapping particle function -- therefore no Bragg peaks -- a clear sign of the absence of classical magnetic order," said Bianchi. "We also observed a distribution of spins with continuously fluctuating directions, which is characteristic of spin liquids and magnetic frustration. This indicates that the material we created behaves like a true spin liquid at low temperatures." After corroborating these observations with computer simulations, the team concluded that they were indeed witnessing a never-before-seen quantum state.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Scientists have discovered evidence that a key rare resource, called helium-3, is potentially ten times more common on Earth than previously known -- though the source of all this extra supply remains mysterious, reports a new study. The finding is important because helium-3 could serve as a foundation of limitless clean power for our civilization, but has been seen as inaccessible since it is largely found in outer space locations, especially the Moon. Helium-3 is an isotope of helium, which means it contains the same number of protons as this common element but a different number of neutrons. This isotope is considered a potentially powerful energy source for future fusion reactors, making it a star of science fiction as well as a sought-out resource in the real world. However, while small amounts of the substance are produced by geological processes and from the fallout of nuclear weapons testing, there is thought to be very little helium-3 available on Earth.

Now, scientists led by Benjamin Birner, a postdoctoral scholar in geosciences at the University of California San Diego, have captured evidence for a previously unknown abundance of helium-3 in the atmosphere, which "presents a major puzzle in the helium-3 budget" and "motivates a search for missing helium-3 sources on Earth, especially since helium-3 is considered an important, yet scarce, resource," according to a study published on Monday in Nature Geoscience. Known sources of helium-3 on Earth only account for 10 percent of the surplus, the researchers said. Birner and his colleagues serendipitously uncovered this inferred surplus of helium-3 (3He) while tackling another challenging problem: measuring the overall rise in atmospheric helium as a result of human consumption of fossil fuels. The team pioneered a first-of-its-kind technique for estimating these anthropogenic helium emissions by examining another isotope, helium-4 (4He), which in turn led to the perplexing conclusion that there is some unknown source of helium-3 on our planet. "We only measured the change in atmospheric 4He," Birner said in an email. "However, previous work by other researchers indicates that the helium isotopic ratio of the atmosphere (3He/4He) is roughly stable. Together these observations imply an increase in atmospheric 3He that matches the rise in 4He or we would see a change in the atmospheric isotope ratio."

Helium-3 could be the ideal fuel for nuclear fusion, a potential energy source that mimics the same process that powers stars. Though nuclear fusion may not materialize as a practical power source for decades, assuming it is feasible at all, its potential to provide clean and limitless energy to the global human population makes it a tantalizing area of study. To that end, scientists across fields are likely to be interested in locating this unexplained surplus of helium-3 on Earth that has been implied by the new research. "That increase of 3He is quite puzzling because we don't have a good explanation for the source of this 3He so far," Birner noted. "It's quite an important puzzle to solve also because 3He is an important and scarce resource for nuclear fusion reactors. Based on the reported uncertainties in previous studies of the atmospheric 3He/4He trend, the buildup of 3He looks significant, but our study clearly motivates a closer look at the atmospheric 3He/4He trend."

The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with nearly a 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted. NPR reports: With human-made climate change continuing, there's a 48% chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels of the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026, a bright red signal in climate change negotiations and science, a team of 11 different forecast centers predicted for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday. The odds are inching up along with the thermometer. Last year, the same forecasters put the odds at closer to 40% and a decade ago it was only 10%.

The team, coordinated by the United Kingdom's Meteorological Office, in their five-year general outlook said there is a 93% chance that the world will set a record for hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there's a 93% chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record. Forecasters also predict the devastating fire-prone megadrought in the U.S. Southwest will keep going. "We're going to see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change," said UK Met Office senior scientist Leon Hermanson, who coordinated the report.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: The oceans that surround us are transforming. As our climate changes, the world's waters are shifting too, with abnormalities evident not only in the ocean's temperature, but also its structure, currents, and even its color. As these changes manifest, the usually stable environment of the ocean is becoming more unpredictable and erratic, and in some ways the phenomenon is akin to the ocean losing its memory, scientists suggest. "Ocean memory, the persistence of ocean conditions, is a major source of predictability in the climate system beyond weather time scales," researchers explain in a new paper led by first author and climate researcher Hui Shi from the Farallon Institute in Petaluma, California. "We show that ocean memory, as measured by the year-to-year persistence of sea surface temperature anomalies, is projected to steadily decline in the coming decades over much of the globe."

In the research, the team studied sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the shallow top layer of the ocean, called the upper-ocean mixed layer (MLD). Despite the MLD's relative shallowness -- extending only to a depth of about 50 meters down from the ocean's surface -- this upper layer of water exhibits a lot of persistence over time in terms of thermal inertia, especially compared to the variations seen in the atmosphere above. In the future, however, modeling suggests that this 'memory' effect of thermal inertia in the upper ocean is set to decline globally over the rest of the century, with dramatically greater variations in temperature predicted over coming decades.

According to the researchers, shoaling effects in the MLD will introduce greater levels of water-mixing in the upper ocean, effectively thinning out the top layer. This is expected to lower the ocean's capacity for thermal inertia, rendering the upper ocean more susceptible to random temperature anomalies. Just what that means for marine wildlife is unclear, but the researchers note that "consequential impacts on populations are likely," although some species are expected to fare better than others in terms of adaptation. On another note, the ocean memory decline is expected to make it significantly harder for scientists to forecast upcoming ocean dynamics, reducing reliable lead times for all sorts of predictions related to SSTs. This will hinder our ability to project monsoons, marine heatwaves (MHWs), and periods of extreme weather, among other things. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

During a press conference Monday morning, NASA provided an update on the status of the Webb Space Telescope and released images from the telescope that put Webb's progress on dazzling display. Gizmodo reports: "I'm delighted to report that the telescope alignment has been completed with performance even better than we had anticipated," said Michael McElwain, a Webb observatory project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a NASA press conference. "This is an extraordinary milestone for humanity." Webb sits at an observational point called L2 nearly 1 million miles from Earth, where it will look further back in time than the Hubble Space Telescope. (Hubble will continue to operate alongside Webb once the latter is operational). [...] The preparation and testing of the telescope's science instruments (a process called commissioning) will take about two months to complete. Only once the commissioning is complete can Webb begin taking the scientific images that will define its tenure in space.

But some images are already being collected, to make sure the telescope is functioning properly. Webb's coldest instrument -- the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) -- recently took a test image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that was previously imaged by the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope's Infrared Array Camera. Webb's image of the same region makes Spitzer's look like a finger painting, showing interstellar gas clearly distributed across the star field. The stars -- blots, in Spitzer's view -- are seven-pointed beacons of light in the MIRI test.

Webb's next steps will focus on taking images of its science targets, known as early release observations. These will not only be the first images of Webb science targets, but they will be the first images processed into full color. (Webb sees the cosmos in the infrared and near-infrared wavelengths, but the images will be translated into visible light.) Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in the briefing that the chief differences between the most recent images and the ones to come are that the former were taken to test the telescope's ability to see clearly, whereas the latter will test the telescope's ability to image science targets. Pontoppidan wouldn't elaborate on what Webb team will capture in the early release observations -- the targets are a "surprise," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists are developing magnetically guided microscopic projectiles that can be injected into patients' blood to attack breast, prostate and other tumors. The project -- led by researchers at Sheffield University -- builds on progress in two key medical fields. The first involves viruses that specifically attack tumors. The second focuses on soil bacteria that manufacture magnets which they use to align themselves in the Earth's magnetic field.

The anti-cancer viruses that are being exploited by the Sheffield group -- who have been funded by Cancer Research UK -- are known as oncolytic viruses. They occur naturally but can also be modified to improve their efficacy and to limit the chances of them infecting healthy cells. [...] "The problem is that oncolytic viruses attract the attention of the body's immune defenses and only skin-deep tumors can be tackled this way before the viruses are blocked fairly quickly by our cell defenses," said Dr Faith Howard, another project leader. A solution, the scientists say, is to coat the viruses in magnetic particles. Injected into the blood, these microscopic projectiles could then be directed quickly to a tumor -- by using magnets placed over a patient's body -- before their progress can be blocked by immune defenses.

An oncolytic virus had a diameter of about 180 nanometers while the magnets needed to be about 50 nanometers in size, added Howard. (A nanometre is a billionth of a meter.) "These tiny magnets could be made in the laboratory but we have found bacteria do a better job of manufacturing them than we could," she added. Some species of soil bacteria synthesize iron oxide nanoparticles that are called magnetosomes. These are used as compasses that allow the microbes to navigate in Earth's magnetic field and help them find optimum conditions for their growth and survival. "These microscopic magnets they make are perfectly shaped and ideally suited to the microscopic packages we need to target deep cancers," Howard said.

Europe's first commercial facility for psychedelic drug trials is to open in London, with the goal of making the UK a global leader in psychedelics research and innovation. From a report: The British startup Clerkenwell Health aims to begin trials in its central London facility in August, initially focusing on the use of psilocybin to help people deal with the anxiety associated with a diagnosis of terminal illness, and to support them through their end-of-life care. The news comes as scientists and policymakers gather in London this Wednesday for the Agenda for Psych Symposium, a daylong programme to discuss the latest research and the future of the psychedelics industry in Europe.

NASA has released some surprisingly colorful visualization of black holes. Digital Trends explains their origins: We're coming to the end of Black Hole Week, NASA's celebration of the beastly cosmic monsters which suck in light, matter, and everything else that comes too close to them....

As part of the festivities, the media department at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has shared a selection of some of the best visualizations of black holes, so you can get an idea of what these mind-bending phenomena are like. The images, which are also available as desktop and mobile wallpapers should you wish to decorate your devices with black hole imagery, show simulations and visualizations created to try and picture what the weird effects of the extreme gravitational forces around a black hole would be.
NASA describes this as "translating the inherently digital data (in the form of ones and zeroes) captured by telescopes in space into images, [creating] visual representations of what would otherwise be invisible to us."

"But what about experiencing these data with other senses, like hearing?

"Sonification is the process that translates data into sound. Our new project brings parts of our Milky Way galaxy, and of the greater Universe beyond it, to listeners for the first time."


And elsewhere, CNN reports astronomers used the unique X-ray echoes released by rare "binary" black hole-star systems to identify six more such systems. (Only two were known previously.) And then converted their data into sound waves. The team tracked changes in the X-ray echoes, determined time lags during transition stages and traced commonalities in the evolution of each black hole outburst. The result sounds like something from a 1950s sci-fi film.

To attack tumors, the Guardian reports, "scientists are developing magnetically guided microscopic projectiles that can be injected into patients' blood." The project — led by researchers at Sheffield University — builds on progress in two key medical fields. The first involves viruses that specifically attack tumours.... After infection with an oncolytic virus, a cancer cell will burst open and die. The US Food and Drug Administration has already approved the use of T-Vec, a modified herpes simplex virus that infects and kills tumour cells and is now being used to treat people with certain types of melanoma, a skin cancer.
Unfortunately, the viruses soon get attacked by the body's immune system. So the scientists want to coat the viruses with magnetic particles, so that magnets (outside a patient's body) can quickly guide those viruses where they're needed.

And to accomplish this they're using a soil bacteria which is known to make magnets to align with Earth's own magnetic field. "The essence of this approach is straightforward," one of the project's leaders explains to the Guardian. "We are using bugs as drugs.... we have found bacteria do a better job of manufacturing them than we could." Having developed the technology, the Sheffield team is now working to ensure they can manufacture sufficient supplies so that clinical trials on humans can begin soon. To date, trials have focused on animal models. "These early tests have been very encouraging and we now need to take the next steps to bring this technique to a state where it can be administered to humans — hopefully in a few years' time."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Falconhell for sharing the article!

Iamthecheese writes: The Mars XR Operations Support System is a virtual environment making use of [Epic Games'] Unreal Engine 5. [NASA is seeking to gather contributions to "replicate the harsh conditions of Mars in order to better train the next generation of astronauts," reports VRScout.] There is a $70,000 prize to be split between 20 contestants. It will be awarded to those with the best assets and scenarios.

There are five (5) different categories to participate in, with particular scenarios to explore in each category:

-Set Up Camp
-Scientific Research
-Maintenance
-Exploration
-Blow Our Minds

I'm guessing little green men will feature heavily in submissions. In any case, it's not just a chance to earn money, but prove oneself to potential employers. Prize and contest information here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: During spring in the Pacific Northwest, meltwater from thawing snow rushes down rivers and the wind often blows hard. These forces spin the region's many power turbines and generate a bounty of electricity at a time of mild temperatures and relatively low energy demand. But much of this seasonal surplus electricity -- which could power air conditioners come summer -- is lost because batteries cannot store it long enough. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy national laboratory in Richland, Wash., are developing a battery that might solve this problem. In a recent paper published in Cell Reports Physical Science, they demonstrated how freezing and thawing a molten salt solution creates a rechargeable battery that can store energy cheaply and efficiently for weeks or months at a time.

Most conventional batteries store energy as chemical reactions waiting to happen. When the battery is connected to an external circuit, electrons travel from one side of the battery to the other through that circuit, generating electricity. To compensate for the change, charged particles called ions move through the fluid, paste or solid material that separates the two sides of the battery. But even when the battery is not in use, the ions gradually diffuse across this material, which is called the electrolyte. As that happens over weeks or months, the battery loses energy. Some rechargeable batteries can lose almost a third of their stored charge in a single month.

"In our battery, we really tried to stop this condition of self-discharge," says PNNL researcher Guosheng Li, who led the project. The electrolyte is made of a salt solution that is solid at ambient temperatures but becomes liquid when heated to 180 degrees Celsius -- about the temperature at which cookies are baked. When the electrolyte is solid, the ions are locked in place, preventing self-discharge. Only when the electrolyte liquifies can the ions flow through the battery, allowing it to charge or discharge. Creating a battery that can withstand repeated cycles of heating and cooling is no small feat. Temperature fluctuations cause the battery to expand and contract, and the researchers had to identify resilient materials that could tolerate these changes. [...] The result is a rechargeable battery made from relatively inexpensive materials that can store energy for extended periods. "Right now the experimental technology is aimed at utility-scale and industrial uses," notes the report. "The PNNL team plans to continue developing the technology, but ultimately it will be up to industry to develop a commercial product."

Chinese researchers show off a swarm of drones collectively navigating a dense forest they've never encountered. TechCrunch reports: Researchers at Zheijang University in Hangzhou have succeeded, however, with a 10-strong drone swarm smart enough to fly autonomously through a dense, unfamiliar forest, but small and light enough that each one can easily fit in the palm of your hand. It's a big step toward using swarms like this for things like aerial surveying and disaster response.

Based on an off-the-shelf ultra-compact drone design, the team built a trajectory planner for the group that relies entirely on data from the onboard sensors of the swarm, which they process locally and share with each other. The drones can balance or be directed to pursue various goals, such as maintaining a certain distance from obstacles or each other, or minimizing the total flight time between two points, and so on.

The drones can also, worryingly, be given a task like "follow this human." We've all seen enough movies to know this is how it starts ... but of course it could be useful in rescue or combat circumstances as well. A part of their navigation involves mapping the world around them, of course, and the paper includes some very cool-looking 3D representations of the environments the swarm was sent through. Zhou et alThe study is published in the most recent issue of the journal Science Robotics, which you can read here, along with several videos showing off the drones in action.

According to the World Health Organization, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the deaths of nearly 15 million people around the world. "That is 13% more deaths than normally expected over two years," notes the BBC. From the report: The WHO believes many countries undercounted the numbers who died from Covid -- only 5.4 million were reported. In India, there were 4.7 million Covid deaths, it says - 10 times the official figures -- and almost a third of Covid deaths globally. The Indian government has questioned the estimate, saying it has "concerns" about the methodology, but other studies have come to similar conclusions about the scale of deaths in the country.

The measure used by the WHO is called excess deaths - how many more people died than would normally be expected based on mortality in the same area before the pandemic hit. These calculations also take into account deaths which were not directly because of Covid but instead caused by its knock-on effects, like people being unable to access hospitals for the care they needed. It also accounts for poor record-keeping in some regions, and sparse testing at the start of the crisis. But the WHO said the majority of the extra 9.5 million deaths seen above the 5.4 million Covid deaths reported were thought to be direct deaths caused by the virus, rather than indirect deaths. Yesterday, the United States officially surpassed 1 million COVID-19 deaths -- "a once unthinkable scale of loss even for the country with the world's highest recorded toll from the virus," says NBC News.

SpaceX brought four astronauts home with a midnight splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday, capping the busiest month yet for Elon Musk's taxi service. From a report: The three U.S. astronauts and one German in the capsule were bobbing off the Florida coast, near Tampa, less than 24 hours after leaving the International Space Station. NASA expected to have them back in Houston later in the morning. NASA's Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, and the European Space Agency's Matthias Maurer, embraced the seven astronauts remaining at the station, before parting ways. "It's the end of a six-month mission, but I think the space dream lives on," Maurer said. SpaceX brought up their U.S. and Italian replacements last week, after completing a charter trip to the station for a trio of businessmen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The pig heart transplanted into an American patient earlier this year in a landmark operation carried a porcine virus that may have derailed the experiment and contributed to his death two months later, say transplant specialists. [...] In a statement released by the university in March, a spokesperson said there was "no obvious cause identified at the time of his death" and that a full report was pending. Now MIT Technology Review has learned that Bennett's heart was affected by porcine cytomegalovirus, a preventable infection that is linked to devastating effects on transplants.

The presence of the pig virus and the desperate efforts to defeat it were described by Griffith during a webinar streamed online by the American Society of Transplantation on April 20. The issue is now a subject of wide discussion among specialists, who think the infection was a potential contributor to Bennett's death and a possible reason why the heart did not last longer. The heart swap in Maryland was a major test of xenotransplantation, the process of moving tissues between species. But because the special pigs raised to provide organs are supposed to be virus-free, it now appears that the experiment was compromised by an unforced error. The biotechnology company that raised and engineered the pigs, Revivicor, declined to comment and has made no public statement about the virus. "It was surprising. That pig is supposed to be clean of all pig pathogens, and this is a significant one," says Mike Curtis, CEO of eGenesis, a competing company that is also breeding pigs for transplant organs. "Without the virus, would Mr. Bennett have lived? We don't know, but the infection didn't help. It likely contributed to the failure."