When Harry Stamper sets off a bomb to save planet Earth in the film Armageddon, his life flashes before his eyes. Now research has revealed tantalising clues that such recall may not be Hollywood hyperbole. From a report: An international team of scientists has reported an unexpected situation in which they recorded the brain activity of an 87-year-old patient as he died. The man had been admitted to a hospital emergency department after a fall that resulted in a bleed in the brain, and subsequently deteriorated. When doctors carried out an electroencephalography (EEG), they had discovered the patient had developed epilepsy. However, during the EEG recordings he had experienced a heart attack and died.

The team says analysis of recordings of the 30 seconds before and after the man's heart stopped beating suggest that in his final moments he experienced changes in different types of brain waves, including alpha and gamma brain waves. The study suggests that interactions between different types of brain wave continue after the blood stops flowing in the brain. But, the researchers add, it also raises an intriguing possibility. "Given that cross-coupling between alpha and gamma activity is involved in cognitive processes and memory recall in healthy subjects, it is intriguing to speculate that such activity could support a last 'recall of life' that may take place in the near-death state," the team writes in the journal Frontiers in Ageing Neuroscience.

However, the findings are based on the recordings from just one person, and the researchers urge caution, noting among other factors that traumatic brain injuries and white matter damage can affect brain waves, while activity of networks in the brain can be affected by anticonvulsant medication such as that given to the patient. Nonetheless, the researchers say the results could have important implications.

For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public. From a report: When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected. The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.

Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country's response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said. Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn't expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds. Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these highly intelligent birds, and to test these new, durable and reusable devices. Instead, the birds outsmarted us. As our new research paper explains, the magpies began showing evidence of cooperative "rescue" behaviour to help each other remove the tracker. While we're familiar with magpies being intelligent and social creatures, this was the first instance we knew of that showed this type of seemingly altruistic behaviour: helping another member of the group without getting an immediate, tangible reward. As academic scientists, we're accustomed to experiments going awry in one way or another. Expired substances, failing equipment, contaminated samples, an unplanned power outage -- these can all set back months (or even years) of carefully planned research. For those of us who study animals, and especially behaviour, unpredictability is part of the job description. This is the reason we often require pilot studies.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The exoplanet WASP-121b, which resides about 900 light-years from Earth, is an egg-shaped scorcher. Temperatures on the planet's day side can reach up to 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit. It's so hot that heavy metal elements, like iron and magnesium, exist as gases and are constantly streaming out of the atmosphere and into space. But the planet's night side has, until now, remained in the dark. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Feb. 21, astronomers shared their first look at the planet's dark side using NASA's Hubble Telescope.

Telescopes at the South African Astronomical Observatory discovered WASP-121b in 2015. The planet, which is a little bigger and heavier than Jupiter, is on the verge of being ripped apart by the gravitational forces of its home star, known as WASP 121. It makes a full orbit of that star once every 1.3 days and is tidally locked -- one side is perpetually bathed in starlight, the other is forever staring out into space. "This is one of the most extreme systems we have," says Ben Montet, an astrophysicist at the University of New South Wales who was not affiliated with the study. He notes its extremely hot day side is hotter than some stars.

Astronomers have only caught glimpses of the two interstellar objects identified in our solar system, reports Space.com — but there's hope that the Webb Space Telescope will show us more: "With Webb, we can do really interesting science at much fainter magnitudes or brightnesses," Cristina Thomas, an astronomer at Northern Arizona University, said in a statement from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which oversees operations for the Webb mission. Thomas is on a research team that has arranged to use the observatory to study an interstellar object, should one appear during the telescope's first year of work.

Webb brings some new talents to the table as well. "The supreme sensitivity and power of Webb now present us with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the chemical composition of these interstellar objects and find out so much more about their nature: where they come from, how they were made, and what they can tell us about the conditions present in their home systems," Martin Cordiner, principal investigator of the project, said in the statement. Cordiner is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C....

"We've never been able to observe interstellar objects in this region of the infrared," Thomas said. "It opens a lot of opportunities for the different compositional signatures that we're interested in. That's going to be a huge boon for us!" Specifically, the team would use infrared observations to study any gas and dust that the interstellar object is emitting, giving scientists a taste of the object's native system.
Right now, far out in space, the Webb Telescope has finished the first stage of aligning its 18-segmented primary mirror, reports another article at Space.com. "A single star that the observatory looked at was deliberately rendered 18 times into a hexagonal shape.

"Eventually, those 18 images will perfectly align into a single, sharp focus, but the interim result portrays a star repeated perfectly in a hexagonal pattern reminiscent of a stunning celestial snowflake."

Further Reading: "Exclusive interview: answers to 20 questions from the James Webb Space Telescope team."

Over the past few weeks the sun "has undergone a series of giant eruptions that have sent plasma hurtling through space," reports Science Alert: Perhaps the most dramatic was a powerful coronal mass ejection and solar flare that erupted from the far side of the Sun on February 15 just before midnight. Based on the size, it's possible that the eruption was in the most powerful category of which our Sun is capable: an X-class flare.

Because the flare and CME were directed away from Earth, we're unlikely to see any of the effects associated with a geomagnetic storm, which occurs when material from the eruption slams into Earth's atmosphere. These include interruptions to communications, power grid fluctuations, and auroras. But the escalating activity suggests that we may anticipate such storms in the imminent future. "This is only the second farside active region of this size since September 2017," astronomer Junwei Zhao of Stanford University's helioseismology group told SpaceWeather. "If this region remains huge as it rotates to the Earth-facing side of the Sun, it could give us some exciting flares."

According to SpaceWeatherLive, which tracks solar activity, the Sun has erupted every day for the month of February, with some days featuring multiple flares. That includes three of the second-most powerful flare category, M-class flares: an M1.4 on February 12; an M1 on February 14; and an M1.3 on February 15. There were also five M-class flares in January. The mild geomagnetic storm that knocked 40 newly launched Starlink satellites from low-Earth orbit followed an M-class flare that took place on January 29.
The article suggests this is normal activity, since the sun is about halfway towards "solar maximum" (its peak of sunspot and flare activity) expected to arrive in 2025, while the "solar minimum" was in 2019.

Further Reading: SciTechDaily reports that the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has now "captured the largest solar prominence eruption ever observed in a single image together with the full solar disc."

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

UPI reports on the results of a new randomized-controlled trial of ivermectin, the "gold standard" of medical research.

UPI reports that treatment with ivermectin "failed to prevent patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 from progressing to serious illness, a study published Friday by JAMA Internal Medicine found." Of 241 patients in the study with mild to moderate symptoms treated with the medication, 52, or 22% developed severe COVID-19, the data showed. Meanwhile, 43 of 249 patients, or 17%, who received "standard" treatment, including corticosteroids and, in a handful of cases, other experimental drugs, progressed to serious illness from the virus, the researchers said.

"Essentially, our study findings have dismissed the notion of ivermectin being a 'miracle drug' against COVID-19," study co-author Dr. Steven Chee Loon Lim told UPI in an email.... In addition, study participants treated with ivermectin reported more side effects than those given other drugs, Lim said. This "raises concerns about the widespread use of this drug," he said.... 14 of the ivermectin patients developed severe diarrhea and four suffered potentially life-threatening kidney damage, the researchers said.
The new study also examined whether patients had to go on a ventilator, needed intensive care or died from their infections — and discovered "there were no significant differences between groups."

And the researchers' study also points out that two additional randomized clinical trials conducted in 2021 also "found no significant effect of ivermectin on symptom resolution and hospitalization rates." UPI now quotes Dr. Lim as saying Friday that despite early hopes for ivermectin, "large and well-designed randomized clinical trials, including ours, have consistently shown that ivermectin offered little or no significant clinical benefits.

"I believe the findings in our study will likely 'close the door' on the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19."

Our ability to process information during decision-making doesn't drop off until age 60, according to new findings that challenge the widespread belief that mental speed starts to decline in our 20s. New Scientist reports: Mischa von Krause at Heidelberg University in Germany and his colleagues analysed data collected from around 1.2 million people aged 10 to 80 who took part in an experiment that was originally designed to measure implicit racial bias. During the task, participants were asked to sort words and images, for example by labelling faces as white or Black, or classifying words such as "joy" or "agony" as good or bad, by pressing one of two buttons. In support of previous studies, the researchers found that people's reaction times speed up from their teens to around age 20, then slow down as they get older. This decline has typically been attributed to slower mental speed, but this isn't the case, says von Krause.

The team used an established model of cognition based on previous research, which assumes people make decisions by continuously considering information until they reach a threshold of certainty. According to this model, the decrease in reaction time from age 20 is probably due to people wanting more certainty before making decisions as they age, visual information taking more time to travel from their eyes to their brain and people taking longer to physically hit the button as they get older. The analysis suggests that people's mental speed increases in their 20s, and stays high until age 60. [...] While the team expects the results will apply to a wide range of cognitive tasks, it is possible that age may affect other tasks differently, such as those relying on memory. The study has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

dargaud writes: NASA's Parker Solar Probe has captured its first images of Venus' surface in visible light. The images show distinctive areas on the planetary surface, including continental regions, plains and plateaus. The images were taken on the nightside of the planet where the heat reemitted by the various surface areas has differing characteristics. "Venus is the third brightest thing in the sky, but until recently we have not had much information on what the surface looked like because our view of it is blocked by a thick atmosphere," said Brian Wood, lead author on the new study and physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. "Now, we finally are seeing the surface in visible wavelengths for the first time from space."

You can view images of Venus' surface in a video produced by NASA on YouTube.

Researchers from the Graduate School of Science, Osaka City University, have provided evidence to suggest that fish have the capacity for MSR, a behavioral test to determine whether an animal possesses the ability of visual self-recognition. As Phys.Org explains, an animal's capacity for MSR is determined when they "touch or scrape a mark placed on their body in a location that can only be indirectly viewed in a mirror." From the report: Professor [Masanori Kohda] says, "Previously, using a brown marking on the throat area of [cleaner fish Labroides dimidiatus], we had shown three out of four cleaner fish to scrape their throats several times after swimming in front of a mirror, a number on par with similar studies done on other animals like elephants, dolphins, and magpies." However, one of the criticisms laid against this result was sample size and the need for repeated studies showing positive results. Teaming up with researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, this study increased the sample size to 18 cleaner fish, with a 94% positive result of 17 of them demonstrating the same behavior from the previous study.
[...]
Prof. Kohda says, "Our previous study demonstrated MSR in L. dimidiatus; however, studies with other animals have shown that simply moving a mirror reignites aggressive behavior, suggesting the animal has only learned a spatial contingency, not MSR." To address this, the team transferred mirror-trained cleaner fish to a tank with a mirror on one side of the tank and then three days later to a tank with a mirror on the other side, and saw the fish show no aggression toward their mirror image in both tanks. Also, to ensure the L. dimidiatus that passed the mark test truly are recognizing themselves, they placed mirror-trained fish in adjacent tanks that were separated by transparent glass. After two to three days, when fish largely reduced their aggressive behavior towards each other, they were marked the standard way the following night. None of the fish scraped their throat during the 120 mins of exposure to each other the following morning. This new experiment was recently published in PLOS Biology.

It's been one year since a nuclear-powered, one-armed, six-wheeled robot punched through the Martian atmosphere at a blazing 12,000 miles per hour, and a supersonic parachute slowed it way down until a rocket-powered "jetpack" could fire its engines and then gently lower it onto the surface. NPR: NASA's Perseverance rover was too far away for engineers on Earth to control it in real time -- which meant that the spacecraft had to execute that daredevil maneuver all by itself. All that the robot's handlers on Earth could do was wait for confirmation that it had touched down safely. "It is a nail-biting experience," Rick Welch, Perseverance's deputy project manager. "There's no doubt about it." Dramatic as the Feb. 18, 2021 touchdown was, the milestones that the car-sized rover has hit in the year since then could one day prove far more momentous.

Perseverance is hunting for evidence of microbes that may have once lived on the red planet -- a first for a NASA robot. It begins a new chapter of Martian exploration: one that not only searches for ancient signs of microbial Martians, but that lays the groundwork to send samples of Mars rocks and dirt back to Earth. One of the mission's main objectives is to collect samples of rocks and dirt and stash them on the surface of Mars so that a future mission could pick them up and bring them back to Earth to study. The $2.7-billion rover is equipped with a suite of scientific instruments including a rock-blasting laser, cameras and spectrometers. But a robot geologist -- even one as advanced as Perseverance -- can only do so much. Scientists really hope to get pieces of the planet back to their labs.

Repeated heading and accidental head impacts in football cause changes to blood patterns in the brain, potentially interfering with signalling pathways, according to a study of players in Norway. From a report: The peer-reviewed research, published in the Brain Injury journal, is the latest item in a growing body of evidence pointing to the dangers of heading. It discovered "specific alterations" in levels of microRNAs in the brain upon analysing blood samples from 89 professional players in the country's top flight.

MicroRNAs are molecules that help to regulate gene expression, through which DNA instructions are converted into products such as proteins, in bodily fluids. The findings suggest that, given the change in levels, they may be able to be used as biomarkers to detect brain injury. Blood samples were taken from players after accidental head impacts in matches and after specifically designed training sessions. Forty-eight of the players, drawn from three teams, took part in a session that included repetitive heading drills from set pieces and similar scenarios; they also undertook one that involved other high-intensity exercise, with no head contact allowed. The results found specific changes in certain microRNA levels whose numbers were unaffected by the other high-intensity exercise.

Herman Pontzer, a biological anthropologist at the Pontzer lab at Duke University, works with his colleagues to "systematically measure the total energy used per day by animals and people in various walks of life," reports Science.org. "The answers coming from their data are often surprising: Exercise doesn't help you burn more energy on average; active hunter-gatherers in Africa don't expend more energy daily than sedentary office workers in Illinois; pregnant women don't burn more calories per day than other adults, after adjusting for body mass." Here's an excerpt from the report: Pontzer's skill as a popularizer can rankle some of his colleagues. His message that exercise won't help you lose weight "lacks nuance," says exercise physiologist John Thyfault of the University of Kansas Medical Center, who says it may nudge dieters into less healthy habits. But others say besides busting myths about human energy expenditure, Pontzer's work offers a new lens for understanding human physiology and evolution. As he wrote in Burn, "In the economics of life, calories are the currency." "His work is revolutionary," says paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello, past president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which has funded Pontzer's work. "We now have data ... that has given us a completely new framework for how we think about how humans adapted to energetic limits."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: There have been more than 1 million excess deaths in the US during the pandemic, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The deaths are mainly attributable to Covid-19, as well as conditions that may have resulted from delayed medical care and overwhelmed health systems. At least 923,000 Americans have died from confirmed Covid cases, according to the CDC. Other causes of death above the normally expected number have included heart disease, hypertension and Alzheimer's disease. Some Americans also die months after their initial Covid diagnosis, because the virus created other fatal complications.

Excess deaths are calculated by looking at previous years' fatalities. In 2019, there were 2.8 million deaths in the US; in 2020, it was approximately 3.3 million. While cause of death can sometimes be difficult to ascertain, and political pressures can lead to miscounting, excess deaths can indicate the broad scope of a health emergency. These figures can reveal the truer toll of Covid -- including deaths directly from infection as well as deaths from the circumstances of the crisis. The global number of excess deaths may be millions higher than the official count of Covid deaths. Excess deaths are also known as untimely or "early" deaths. While the majority of excess deaths in the US occurred among those 65 and older, many of those Americans had many years left to live.

The Food and Drug Administration cleared a smartphone app from Tandem Diabetes Care to program insulin delivery for its t:slim X2 insulin pump, the company announced Wednesday. The Verge reports: It's the first phone app for both iOS and Android to able to deliver insulin, the company said in a statement. Previously, delivery had to be handled through the pump itself. With this update, pump users will be able to program or cancel bolus doses of insulin, which are taken at mealtimes and are crucial in keeping blood glucose levels under control. "Giving a meal bolus is now the most common reason a person interacts with their pump, and the ability to do so using a smartphone app offers a convenient and discrete solution," John Sheridan, president and CEO of Tandem Diabetes Care, said in a statement. [...] Tandem said in the statement that it will launch the new bolus delivery update for select users this spring ahead of a wider launch this summer.

Air pollution may affect semen quality, specifically sperm motility -- the ability of sperm to swim in the right direction -- according to a new study analysing the sperm of over 30,000 men in China. From a report: The research, published today in the journal JAMA Networks, also suggests that the smaller the size of the polluting particles in the air, the greater the link with poor semen quality. "Our findings suggest that smaller particulate matter size fractions may be more potent than larger fractions in inducing poor sperm motility," wrote the authors of the paper. The researchers believe that these findings highlight yet another reason for the need to reduce exposure to air pollution among men in their reproductive age.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [S]cientists at JILA, a joint operation between the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado Boulder, have measured time dilation at the smallest scale ever using the most accurate clocks in the world. The team showed that clocks located just a millimeter apart -- about the width of a pencil tip -- showed slightly different times due to the influence of Earth's gravity. The new experiment paves the way toward clocks with 50 times the precision of those available today, which could be used for a host of practical applications, while also shedding light on fundamental mysteries about our universe, including the long-sought "union of general relativity and quantum mechanics," according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature.

In 2010, JILA scientists used these clocks to measure time dilation at two points with a difference in elevation of 33 centimeters (roughly a foot), which was a big advance at that point. After a decade of fine-tuning their clocks, [Jun Ye, a JILA physicist who co-authored the study] and his colleagues have managed to track frequency shifts within a sample of 100,000 extremely cold strontium atoms, enabling them to snag the unprecedented millimeter-scale effects of dilation. What's more, the team managed to keep these atoms dancing in perfect unison for 37 seconds, setting a new record for the duration of "quantum coherence," or the state in which the behavior of these atoms can be predicted.

Virgin Galactic announced that it's opening ticket sales to the general public for its spaceflight system, "letting you become an astronaut if you're willing to pay $450,000 and put down a $150,000 deposit," reports Engadget. From the report: For that $450K, you'll get a 90-minute ride to the edge of space including the "signature air launch and Mach-3 boost to space," the company said. Passengers will enjoy several minutes of weightlessness and spectacular views of Earth from the 17 windows, as it showed in a new video (below). The ticket also includes several days of astronaut training, a fitted Under Armour spacesuit, and membership in the Future Astronaut community. All flights launch from Spaceport America in New Mexico.

"We plan to have our first 1,000 customers on board at the start of commercial service later this year, providing an incredibly strong foundation as we begin regular operations and scale our fleet," said Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier in a statement. As of late last year, the company had sold 100 tickets to space at the updated $450,000 ticket price. Around 700 people, including Elon Musk, have made reservations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A U.S. patient with leukemia has become the first woman and the third person to date to be cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant from a donor who was naturally resistant to the virus that causes AIDS, researchers reported on Tuesday. The case of a middle-aged woman of mixed race, presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver, is also the first involving umbilical cord blood, a newer approach that may make the treatment available to more people. Since receiving the cord blood to treat her acute myeloid leukemia -- a cancer that starts in blood-forming cells in the bone marrow -- the woman has been in remission and free of the virus for 14 months, without the need for potent HIV treatments known as antiretroviral therapy. The two prior cases occurred in males -- one white and one Latino -- who had received adult stem cells, which are more frequently used in bone marrow transplants.

"This is now the third report of a cure in this setting, and the first in a woman living with HIV," Sharon Lewin, President-Elect of the International AIDS Society, said in a statement. The case is part of a larger U.S.-backed study led by Dr. Yvonne Bryson of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It aims to follow 25 people with HIV who undergo a transplant with stem cells taken from umbilical cord blood for the treatment of cancer and other serious conditions.

NASA, in a blog post: Coastal flooding will increase significantly over the next 30 years because of sea level rise, according to a new report by an interagency sea level rise task force that includes NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other federal agencies. Titled Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States, the Feb. 15 report concludes that sea level along U.S. coastlines will rise between 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 centimeters) on average above today's levels by 2050. The report -- an update to a 2017 report -- forecasts sea level to the year 2150 and, for the first time, offers near-term projections for the next 30 years. Agencies at the federal, state, and local levels use these reports to inform their plans on anticipating and coping with the effects of sea level rise.

"This report supports previous studies and confirms what we have long known: Sea levels are continuing to rise at an alarming rate, endangering communities around the world. Science is indisputable and urgent action is required to mitigate a climate crisis that is well underway," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "NASA is steadfast in our commitment to protecting our home planet by expanding our monitoring capabilities and continuing to ensure our climate data is not only accessible but understandable." The task force developed their near-term sea level rise projections by drawing on an improved understanding of how the processes that contribute to rising seas -- such as melting glaciers and ice sheets as well as complex interactions between ocean, land, and ice -- will affect ocean height. "That understanding has really advanced since the 2017 report, which gave us more certainty over how much sea level rise we'll get in the coming decades," said Ben Hamlington, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and one of the update's lead authors.

NASA's Sea Level Change Team, led by Hamlington, has also developed an online mapping tool to visualize the report's state-of-the-art sea level rise projections on a localized level across the U.S. "The hope is that the online tool will help make the information as widely accessible as possible," Hamlington said. The Interagency Sea Level Rise Task Force projects an uptick in the frequency and intensity of high-tide coastal flooding, otherwise known as nuisance flooding, because of higher sea level. It also notes that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, global temperatures will become even greater, leading to a greater likelihood that sea level rise by the end of the century will exceed the projections in the 2022 update.