The first pill designed to treat symptomatic Covid has been approved by the UK medicines regulator. From a report: The tablet -- molnupiravir -- will be given twice a day to vulnerable patients recently diagnosed with the disease. In clinical trials the pill, originally developed to treat flu, cut the risk of hospitalisation or death by about half. Health Secretary Sajid Javid said the treatment was a "gamechanger" for the most frail and immunosuppressed. In a statement he said: "Today is a historic day for our country, as the UK is now the first country in the world to approve an antiviral that can be taken at home for Covid."

Molnupiravir, developed by the US drug companies Merck, Sharp and Dohme (MSD) and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, is the first antiviral medication for Covid which can be taken as a pill rather than injected or given intravenously. The UK has agreed to purchase 480,000 courses with the first deliveries expected in November. Initially it will be given to both vaccinated and unvaccinated patients through a national study, with extra data on its effectiveness collected before any decision to order more. The drug needs to be given within five days of symptoms developing to be most effective. It's not immediately clear how it will be distributed so quickly by the NHS. It's thought some care homes may be offered supplies while other elderly or vulnerable patients may be prescribed it by their GP after testing positive for Covid.

On Monday, A group of diplomats from the United Kingdom proposed that the United Nations set up a group to develop new norms of international behavior in space, with the aim of preventing the kinds of misunderstandings that could lead to war. Wired reports: As spacefaring nations advance their military satellite capabilities, including being able to disrupt or damage other satellites, such provocative behavior could escalate already-tense diplomatic situations -- and create more space debris in low earth orbit, a crucial region that's already chock-full of derelict spacecraft. This is the first significant progress in developing space rules in more than four decades. The most important piece of space law, the Outer Space Treaty, was negotiated by the fledgling space powers in 1967.

Monday's vote before the UN's First Committee, which is focused on international security and disarmament, passed overwhelmingly, with representatives of 163 countries voting yea versus eight nays and nine abstentions. Considering the widespread support for the proposal, including backing from the Biden administration, Edmondson expects it to pass in the full UN General Assembly next month. The proposal would create a new working group at the UN that will meet twice a year in Geneva in 2022 and 2023. By the end of that time, the group must reach consensus on new rules and identify areas in need of further investigation. Crafting norms for the kinds of activities that escalate tensions or generate debris will likely be top priority for this group, says Cassandra Steer, an expert on space law and space security at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Joshua Chou writes via The Conversation: Last month the Australian Space Agency announced plans to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon by as early as 2026, under a deal with NASA. The rover will collect lunar soil containing oxygen, which could eventually be used to support human life in space. Although the deal with NASA made headlines, a separate mission conducted by private companies in Australia and Canada, in conjunction with the University of Technology Sydney, may see Australian technology hunting water on the Moon as soon as mid-2024. If all goes according to plan, it will be the first rover with Australian-made components to make it to the Moon.

The ten-kilogram rover, measuring 60x60x50cm, will be launched on board the Hakuto lander made by ispace, a lunar robotic exploration company based in Japan. The rover itself, also built by ispace, will have an integrated robotic arm created by the private companies Stardust Technologies (based in Canada) and Australia's EXPLOR Space Technology (of which I am one of the founders). Using cameras and sensors, the arm will collect high-resolution visual and haptic data to be sent back to the mission control centre at the University of Technology Sydney. It will also collect information on the physical and chemical composition of lunar dust, soil and rocks -- specifically with a goal of finding water. We know water is present within the Moon's soil, but we have yet to find a way to extract it for practical use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Originally, they were thought to be just specks of dust on a microscope slide. Now, a new study suggests that microchromosomes -- a type of tiny chromosome found in birds and reptiles -- have a longer history, and a bigger role to play in mammals than we ever suspected. By lining up the DNA sequence of microchromosomes across many different species, researchers have been able to show the consistency of these DNA molecules across bird and reptile families, a consistency that stretches back hundreds of millions of years. What's more, the team found that these bits of genetic code have been scrambled and placed on larger chromosomes in marsupial and placental mammals, including humans. In other words, the human genome isn't quite as 'normal' as previously supposed.

By tracing these microchromosomes back to the ancient Amphioxus, the scientists were able to establish genetic links to all of its descendants. These tiny 'specks of dust' are actually important building blocks for vertebrates, not just abnormal extras. It seems that most mammals have absorbed and jumbled up their microchromosomes as they've evolved, making them seem like normal pieces of DNA. The exception is the platypus, which has several chromosome sections line up with microchromosomes, suggesting that this method may well have acted as a 'stepping stone' for other mammals in this regard, according to the researchers. A tree chart outlining the presence of similar DNA in snakes, lizards, birds, crocodiles, and mammals. The study also revealed that as well as being similar across numerous species, the microchromosomes were also located in the same place inside cells. "It's not clear whether there's an evolutionary benefit to coding DNA in larger chromosomes or in microchromosomes, and the findings outlined in this paper might help scientists put that particular debate to rest -- although a lot of questions remain," adds ScienceAlert. "The study suggests that the large chromosome approach that has evolved in mammals isn't actually the normal state, and might be a disadvantage: genes are packed together much more tightly in microchromosomes, for example."

The findings have been published in the journal PNAS.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has formally endorsed the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine for children aged 5 through 11, a move that will buttress defenses against a possible surge as winter arrives and ease the worries of tens of millions of pandemic-weary parents. From a report: At a meeting earlier in the day, a panel of scientific advisers had unanimously recommended that the vaccine be given to these children. Inoculations could begin as soon as this week. "Together, with science leading the charge, we have taken another important step forward in our nation's fight against the virus that causes Covid-19," Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the C.D.C., said in a statement Tuesday night. The C.D.C.'s endorsement arrives just as Americans prepare for a potentially risky holiday season. Cases in the United States have been falling steadily for weeks, but experts have warned that indoor gatherings may send the rates soaring again. Many Americans seem determined to celebrate; already airlines are bracing for what may be the busiest travel season since the start of the pandemic.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Pro Publica: It's not a secret that industrial facilities emit hazardous air pollution. A new ProPublica analysis shows for the first time just how much toxic air pollution they emit -- and how much the chemicals they unleash could be elevating cancer risk in their communities. ProPublica's analysis of five years of modeled EPA data identified more than 1,000 toxic hot spots across the country and found that an estimated 250,000 people living in them may be exposed to levels of excess cancer risk that the EPA deems unacceptable.

The agency has long collected the information on which our analysis is based. Thousands of facilities nationwide that are considered large sources of toxic air pollution submit a report to the government each year on their chemical emissions. But the agency has never released this data in a way that allows the public to understand the risks of breathing the air where they live. Using the reports submitted between 2014 and 2018, we calculated the estimated excess cancer risk from industrial sources across the entire country and mapped it all. The EPA's threshold for an acceptable level of cancer risk is 1 in 10,000, meaning that of 10,000 people living in an area, there would likely be one additional case of cancer over a lifetime of exposure. But the agency has also said that ideally, Americans' added level of cancer risk from air pollution should be far lower, 1 in a million. Our map highlights areas where the additional cancer risk is greater than 1 in 100,000 -- 10 times lower than the EPA's threshold, but still high enough to be of concern, experts say. The map is interactive, allowing you to click on a hot spot to learn more about the industrial emissions there. You can also type in an address to find the increased estimated cancer risk at that location.

Climate change is revealing long-frozen artifacts and animals to archaeologists. But the window for study is slender and shrinking. From a report: Glacial archaeology is a relatively new discipline. The ice was literally broken during the summer of 1991 when German hikers in the Otztal Alps spotted a tea-colored corpse half-embedded on the Italian side of the border with Austria. Initially mistaken for a modern-day mountaineer killed in a climbing accident, Otzi the Iceman, as he came to be called, was shown through carbon-dating to have died about 5,300 years ago.

A short, comprehensively tattooed man in his mid-40s, Otzi wore a bearskin cap, several layers of clothing made of goat and deer hides, and bearskin-soled shoes stuffed with grass to keep his feet warm. The Iceman's survival gear included a longbow of yew, a quiver of arrows, a copper ax and a kind of crude first-aid kit full of plants with powerful pharmacological properties. A chest X-ray and a CT scan showed a flint arrowhead buried deep in Otzi's left shoulder, suggesting that he may have bled to death. His killing is humankind's oldest unsolved cold case. Six years later, in the Yukon's snow fields, hunting tools dating back thousands of years appeared from the melting ice. Soon, similar finds were reported in Western Canada, the Rockies and the Swiss Alps.

In 2006, a long, hot autumn in Norway resulted in an explosion of discoveries in the snowbound Jotunheimen mountains, home to the JÃtnar, the rock and frost giants of Norse mythology. Of all the dislodged detritus, the most intriguing was a 3,400-year-old proto-Oxford most likely fashioned out of reindeer hide. The discovery of the Bronze Age shoe signified the beginning of glacial surveying in the peaks of Innlandet County, where the state-funded Glacier Archaeology Program was started in 2011. Outside of the Yukon, it is the only permanent rescue project for discoveries in ice. Glacial archaeology differs from its lowland cousin in critical ways. G.A.P. researchers usually conduct fieldwork only within a short time frame from mid-August to mid-September, between the thaw of old snow and the arrival of new.

Starlink, part of Elon Musk's SpaceX company, has formed a subsidiary in India and is preparing to apply for licenses from the local government, according to a top official. From a report: "Pleased to share that SpaceX now has a 100% owned subsidiary in India," Sanjay Bhargava, India director for Starlink, said in a LinkedIn post Monday. Starlink's local India unit is registered with the name Starlink Satellite Communications Private Limited. A local unit is required for an internet company to offer its services in India, where Starlink -- assuming that it gets the license -- plans to offer 200,000 active terminals in over 160,000 districts by December 2022, the company representatives said. That's an ambitious goal for the company, which as of August had shipped 100,000 user terminals in 14 countries.

"NASA scientists have just published a commentary article in Nature calling for a framework for reporting extraterrestrial life to the world," reports Cosmos magazine (in an article shared by Slashdot reader Tesseractic): "Our generation could realistically be the one to discover evidence of life beyond Earth," write NASA Chief Scientist James Green and colleagues. "With this privileged potential comes responsibility. As life-detection objectives become increasingly prominent in space sciences, it is essential to open a community dialogue about how to convey information in a subject matter that is diverse, complicated and has a high potential to be sensationalised..."

Green and colleagues argue that...we should reframe such a discovery, so it isn't presented as a single moment when aliens are announced to the world. Instead, it should be seen as a progressive endeavour, reflecting the process of science itself. "If, instead, we recast the search for life as a progressive endeavour, we convey the value of observations that are contextual or suggestive but not definitive and emphasise that false starts and dead ends are an expected part of a healthy scientific process," they write. This will involve scientists, technologists and the media talking to each other to agree firstly on objective standards of evidence for life, and secondly on the best way to communicate that evidence.

This, they say, should preferably be done now before a detection of life is made, rather than scramble to put it together in the aftermath.
"The team kickstarts the conversation by proposing a 'confidence of life detection' (CoLD) scale, which contains seven steps taking us from first exciting potential detection of life to definitive confirmation," Cosmos points out. (With the stages including the discoveries of unquestionable biosignatures, a habitable environment, and then corroborating evidence.) Cosmos argues that "This is an increasingly important conversation to have — because experts think that the odds aliens exist are high."

And they close their article by quoting NASA's team. "Whatever the outcome of the dialogue, what matters is that it occurs. In doing so, we can only become more effective at communicating the results of our work, and the wonder associated with it."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A new study from the [CDC] finds that vaccination provides better protection against hospitalization with COVID-19 than a previous infection with the virus. The analysis found people hospitalized with coronavirus-like symptoms were more than five times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 if they had had recent prior infection than if they were recently vaccinated. The study released Friday examined more than 7,000 people across nine states and 187 hospitals, comparing those who were unvaccinated and had previously had the coronavirus in the last three to six months and those who were vaccinated over the same time frame.

The CDC urged even those who were previously infected to get their shots. [...] Overall, [CDC Director Rochelle Walensky] said at a press briefing earlier this week that the hospitalization rate among unvaccinated people is 12 times higher than for vaccinated people. The vaccination rate for those 12 and older has now reached 78 percent with at least one shot, but Walensky noted that still leaves more than 60 million eligible Americans unvaccinated.

NASA is calling on any interested humans to contribute to the machine learning algorithms that help Perseverance get around. All you need to do is look at some images and label geological features. ExtremeTech reports: The project is known as AI4Mars, and it's a continuation of a project started last year using images from Curiosity. That particular rover arrived on Mars in 2012 and has been making history ever since. NASA used Curiosity as the starting point when designing Perseverance. The new rover has 23 cameras, which capture a ton of visual data from Mars, but the robot has to rely on human operators to interpret most of those images. The rover has enhanced AI to help it avoid obstacles, and it will get even better if you chip in.

The AI4Mars site lets you choose between Opportunity, Curiosity, and the new Perseverance images. After selecting the kind of images you want to scope out, the site will provide you with several different marker types and explanations of what each one is. For example, the NavCam asks you to ID sand, consolidated soil (where the wheels will get good traction), bedrock, and big rocks. There are examples of all these formations, so it's a snap to get started.

Nasa's Juno mission, the solar-powered robotic explorer of Jupiter, has completed its five-year prime mission to reveal the inner workings of the Solar System's biggest planet. The most recent findings from these measurements have now been published in a series of papers, revealing the three-dimensional structure of Jupiter's weather systems -- including of its famous Great Red Spot, a centuries-old storm big enough to swallow the Earth whole. The Conversation reports: Jupiter's Great Red Spot has had a hard time in recent years. [...] But fans of the storm can take comfort from Juno's latest findings. In 2017, Juno was able to observe the red spot in microwave light. Then, in 2019, as Juno flew at more than 200,000 kilometers per hour above the vortex, Nasa's Deep Space Network was monitoring the spacecraft's velocity from millions of kilometers away. Tiny changes as small as 0.01 millimeters per second were detected, caused by the gravitational force from the massive spot. By modeling the microwave and gravity data, my colleagues and I were able to determine that the famous storm is at least 300 km (186 miles) deep, maybe as deep as 500 km (310 miles). That's deeper than the expected cloud-forming "weather layer" that reaches down to around 65 km (40 miles) below the surface, but higher than the jet streams that might extend down to 3,000 km (1,864 miles). The deeper the roots, the more likely the Red Spot is to persist in the years to come, despite the superficial battering it has been receiving from passing storms. To place the depth in perspective, the International Space Station orbits ~420 km (260 miles) above Earth's surface. Yet despite these new findings, the spot could still be a "pancake-like" structure floating in the bottomless atmosphere, with the spot's 12,000 km (7,456 mile) width being 40 times larger than its depth.

In the cloud-forming weather layer, Juno's microwave antennae saw the expected structure of belts and zones. The cool zones appeared dark, indicating the presence of ammonia gas, which absorbs microwave light. Conversely, the belts were bright in microwave light, consistent with a lack of ammonia. These bright and dark bands in the weather layer were perfectly aligned with the winds higher up, measured at the top of the clouds. But what happens when we probe deeper? The temperature of Jupiter's atmosphere is just right for the formation of a water cloud around 65 km (40 miles) down below the cloud tops. When Juno peered through this layer, it found something unexpected. The belts became microwave-dark, and the zones became microwave-bright. This is the complete reverse of what we saw in the shallower cloudy regions, and we are calling this transition layer the "jovicline" -- some 45-80 km (28-50 miles) below the visible clouds. [...] The jovicline may separate the shallow cloud-forming weather layer from the deep abyss below. This unexpected result implies something is moving all that ammonia around.

One possibility is that each jet stream is associated with a "circulation cell," a climate phenomenon that moves gases around via currents of rising and falling air. The rising could cause ammonia enrichment, and the sinking ammonia depletion. If true, there would be about eight of these circulation cells in each hemisphere. [...] Other meteorological phenomena might be responsible for moving the ammonia around within this deep atmosphere. For example, vigorous storms in Jupiter's belts might create mushy ammonia-water hailstones (known as "mushballs"), which deplete ammonia within the shallow belts before falling deep, eventually evaporating to enrich the belts at great depths.

The Pacific lingcod is an ill-tempered, omnivorous fish with a mouth like a messy silverware drawer, its 500-plus teeth arranged haphazardly on two sets of highly mobile jaws. New research, published this month in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reveals that the Pacific lingcod gains and loses an average of 20 teeth every day. From a report: If humans had the same dental scheme, we'd replace a tooth daily. "Kind of makes braces useless," says Adam Summers, professor of biology at the University of Washington and co-author of the study. "And brushing." The Pacific lingcod's rate of tooth replacement came as a surprise to researchers, says study co-author Karly Cohen, a PhD student at the University of Washington studying the biomechanics of feeding.

"The existing research we have on tooth replacement comes from oddballs," Cohen says, such as anglerfish that grow teeth on their foreheads, or the piranha, which can lose a quarter of its teeth at a time. "But most fish have teeth like lingcod. And so it could very well be that most fishes are losing mass amounts of their teeth daily" and replacing them quickly, like this species, she adds. The Pacific lingcod is an ornery sportfish about four feet long at adulthood, an ambush predator that frequently indulges in cannibalism. It's found on the North American west coast, from Alaska to Baja California, Mexico, and it's economically important to fishers in part because it's "great in a taco," Cohen says.

Scientists have discovered a new phase of water -- adding to liquid, solid and gas -- know as "superionic ice." The "strange black" ice, as scientists called it, is normally created at the core of planets like Neptune and Uranus. From a report: In a study published in Nature Physics, a team of scientists co-led by Vitali Prakapenka, a University of Chicago research professor, detailed the extreme conditions necessary to produce this kind of ice. It had only been glimpsed once before, when scientists sent a massive shockwave through a droplet of water, creating superionic ice that only existed for an instant. In this experiment, the research team took a different approach. They pressed water between two diamonds, the hardest material on Earth, to reproduce the intense pressure that exists at the core of planets. Then, they used the Advanced Photon Source, or high-brightness X-ray beams, to shoot a laser through the diamonds to heat the water, according to the study.

"Imagine a cube, a lattice with oxygen atoms at the corners connected by hydrogen when it transforms into this new superionic phase, the lattice expands, allowing the hydrogen atoms to migrate around while the oxygen atoms remain steady in their positions," Prakapenka said in a press release. "It's kind of like a solid oxygen lattice sitting in an ocean of floating hydrogen atoms." Using an X-ray to look at the results, the team found the ice became less dense and was described as black in color because it interacted differently with light. "It's a new state of matter, so it basically acts as a new material, and it may be different from what we thought," Prakapenka said.

Predicting the next word someone might say -- like AI algorithms now do when you search the internet or text a friend -- may be a key part of the human brain's ability to process language, new research suggests. From a report: How the brain makes sense of language is a long-standing question in neuroscience. The new study demonstrates how AI algorithms that aren't designed to mimic the brain can help to understand it. "No one has been able to make the full pipeline from word input to neural mechanism to behavioral output," says Martin Schrimpf, a Ph.D. student at MIT and an author of the new paper published this week in PNAS.

The researchers compared 43 machine-learning language models, including OpenAI's GPT-2 model that is optimized to predict the next words in a text, to data from brain scans of how neurons respond when someone reads or hears language. They gave each model words and measured the response of nodes in the artificial neural networks that, like the brain's neurons, transmit information. Those responses were then compared to the activity of neurons -- measured with functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) or electrocorticography -- when people performed different language tasks. The activity of nodes in the AI models that are best at next-word prediction was similar to the patterns of neurons in the human brain. These models were also better at predicting how long it took someone to read a text -- a behavioral response. Models that exceled at other language tasks -- like filling in a blank word in a sentence -- didn't predict the brain responses as well.

Female California condors don't need males to have offspring -- joining sharks, rays, and lizards on the list of creatures that can reproduce without mating. From a report: "There's something really confusing about the condor data." Those weren't the words Oliver Ryder wanted to hear as he walked to his car after a long day's work trying to save California condors, one of the most endangered animals on the planet. When his colleague Leona Chemnick explained what she was seeing, his dread quickly changed to fascination. For decades, scientists have been trying to coax the California condor back from the edge of extinction. The entire population of these birds crashed to just 22 animals in 1982. By 2019, captive breeding and release efforts had slowly built the total population up over 500. Doing that has required careful management of captive birds, particularly selecting which males and females can breed to produce healthy offspring. That's how, as the scientists took a closer at genetic data, they discovered that two male birds -- known only by their studbook numbers, SB260 and SB517 -- showed no genetic contribution from the birds that should have been their fathers.

In other words, the birds came into the world by facultative parthenogenesis -- or virgin birth -- according to a peer-reviewed paper published October 28 in the Journal of Heredity. Such asexual reproduction in normally sexually reproducing species occurs when certain cells produced with a female animal's egg behave like sperm and fuse with the egg. Though rare in vertebrates, parthenogenesis occurs in sharks, rays, and lizards. Scientists have also recorded self-fertilization in some captive bird species, such as turkeys, chickens, and Chinese painted quail, usually only when females are housed without access to a male. But this is the first time it's been recorded in California condors.

A major solar flare erupted from the sun on Thursday in the strongest storm yet of our star's current weather cycle. Space.com reports: The sun fired off an X1-class solar flare, its most powerful kind of flare, that peaked at 11:35 a.m. EDT (1535 GMT), according to an alert from the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), which tracks space weather events. The flare caused a temporary, but strong, radio blackout across the sunlit side of Earth centered on South America, the group wrote in an statement. NASA officials called the solar eruption a "significant solar flare," adding that it was captured in real-time video by the space agency's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

A coronal mass ejection from the flare, a huge eruption of charged particles, could reach Earth by Saturday or Sunday (Oct. 30-31), just in time for Halloween, SpaceWeather.com reported. The eruption could supercharge Earth's northern lights and potentially interfere with satellite-based communications. [...] Thursday's flare appeared to also spawn a coronal mass ejection, SWPC officials said. [...] The sun is in the early days of its current solar activity cycle, each of which lasts 11 years. The current cycle, called solar cycle 25, began in December 2019.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: In a new study, researchers temporarily made the blood-brain barrier more permeable, allowing a monoclonal antibody to target cancer that had spread to the brain. Scientists made it possible for the drug to cross the barrier -- a protective membrane which prevents most larger molecules from entering the brain -- using focused ultrasound beams guided by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Though there has been promising research on the technique, it had never been used to deliver a drug to the brain. Scientists also used a system of radioactive tagging to show that more of the drug had reached the tumors. No patient had notable side effects from the treatment. Though the study was preliminary, it could open the door to treating a whole range of diseases impacting the brain.

In the study, four patients with a type of metastatic breast cancer, Her2-positive, first received a treatment of trastuzumab, a common monoclonal antibody treatment also called Herceptin. Collectively, the patients received 20 treatments -- up to six each. The ultrasound therapy took place inside a high-resolution MRI scanner that the researchers used to target the treatment. The researchers used a hemispheric helmet with 1024 ultrasound transducers to deliver the ultrasound, targeting it by both moving the helmet and adjusting the voltage across individual transducers, causing a slight difference in the phase of the ultrasound that can correct for variations in the thickness of the skull. [...]

While the ultrasound was delivered, the patients were also receiving an infusion of lipid-based microbubbles. In combination with targeted ultrasound, the microbubbles produce the temporary permeability of the blood-brain barrier. Scientists still don't entirely know why this is. In the 1950s, researchers started to notice that ultrasound seemed to break down the blood-brain barrier. Hynynen came across these early studies while doing cancer research and started to try the technique to make the barrier more permeable. But in animal studies, using only ultrasound didn't consistently avoid injury. Only when the researchers tried using microbubbles did they avoid inflicting damage.

Covid-19 cases and deaths are climbing across the world for the first time in two months as the virus surges across Europe, World Health Organization officials said at a briefing Thursday. From a report: After weeks of decline, infections in Europe have risen over the last three consecutive weeks, even as cases fall in every other region across the world, according to WHO. There were nearly 3 million new Covid cases reported worldwide for the week ended Sunday, an increase of 4% from the previous seven days, according to WHO's most recent epidemiological update. Globally, Covid cases had fallen 4% the week before, despite a 7% increase across Europe over that same period. Cases in Europe surged by 18% over the last week alone, WHO data shows.

"The global number of reported cases and deaths from Covid-19 is now increasing for the first time in two months, driven by an ongoing rise in Europe that outweighs declines in other regions," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. "It's another reminder that the Covid-19 pandemic is far from over." Covid has surged sharply in Czechia and Hungary, where the seven-day average of cases swelled more than 100% from the previous week as of Wednesday, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University. Croatia, Denmark, Norway and Poland each recorded weekly average case increases of more than 70% on Wednesday, JHU found.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: A cheap antidepressant reduced the need for hospitalization among high-risk adults with COVID-19 in a study hunting for existing drugs that could be repurposed to treat coronavirus. Researchers tested the pill used for depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder because it was known to reduce inflammation and looked promising in smaller studies. They've shared the results with the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which publishes treatment guidelines, and they hope for a World Health Organization recommendation. The pill, called fluvoxamine, would cost $4 for a course of COVID-19 treatment. By comparison, antibody IV treatments cost about $2,000 and Merck's experimental antiviral pill for COVID-19 is about $700 per course.

Researchers tested the antidepressant in nearly 1,500 Brazilians recently infected with coronavirus who were at risk of severe illness because of other health problems, such as diabetes. About half took the antidepressant at home for 10 days, the rest got dummy pills. They were tracked for four weeks to see who landed in the hospital or spent extended time in an emergency room when hospitals were full. In the group that took the drug, 11% needed hospitalization or an extended ER stay, compared to 16% of those on dummy pills. The results, published Wednesday in the journal Lancet Global Health, were so strong that independent experts monitoring the study recommended stopping it early because the results were clear. Questions remain about the best dosing, whether lower risk patients might also benefit and whether the pill should be combined with other treatments.