An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Mini brains grown in a lab from stem cells have spontaneously developed rudimentary eye structures scientists report in a fascinating new paper. On tiny, human-derived brain organoids grown in dishes, two bilaterally symmetrical optic cups were seen to grow, mirroring the development of eye structures in human embryos. This incredible result will help us to better understand the process of eye differentiation and development, as well as eye diseases. Brain organoids are not true brains, as you might be thinking of them. They are small, three-dimensional structures grown from induced pluripotent stem cells -- cells harvested from adult humans and reverse engineered into stem cells, that have the potential to grow into many different types of tissue. In this case, these stem cells are coaxed to grow into blobs of brain tissue, without anything resembling thoughts, emotions, or consciousness. Such 'mini brains' are used for research purposes where using actual living brains would be impossible, or at the very least, ethically tricky -- testing drug responses, for example, or observing cell development under certain adverse conditions.

Previous work in the development of organoids showed evidence of retinal cells, but these did not develop optic structures, so the team changed their protocols. They didn't attempt to force the development of purely neural cells at the early stages of neural differentiation, and added retinol acetate to the culture medium as an aid to eye development. Their carefully tended baby brains formed optic cups as early as 30 days into development, with the structures clearly visible at 50 days. This is consistent with the timing of eye development in the human embryo, which means these organoids could be useful for studying the intricacies of this process. There are other implications, too. The optic cups contained different retinal cell types, which organized into neural networks that responded to light, and even contained lens and corneal tissue. Finally, the structures displayed retinal connectivity to regions of the brain tissue. The research has been published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Almost 20 years before SARS-CoV-2, a related and even more lethal coronavirus sowed panic, killing nearly 10% of the 8000 people who became infected. But the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) may have left some survivors with a gift. Former SARS patients who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 appear able to fend off all variants of SARS-CoV-2 in circulation, as well as ones that may soon emerge, a new study suggests. Their formidable antibodies may even protect against coronaviruses in other species that have yet to make the jump into humans -- and may hold clues to how to make a so-called pancoronavirus vaccine that could forestall future outbreaks.

A team led by emerging disease specialist Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore identified eight SARS survivors who recently received two shots of a messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccine. In the test tube, antibodies sieved from their blood potently "neutralized" an early strain of SARS-CoV-2 as well as SARS-CoV, the virus that caused SARS, Wang and colleagues report today in The New England Journal of Medicine. The team further found these neutralizing antibodies worked well against the Alpha, Beta, and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2 and stymied five related coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins that potentially could infect humans.

The asteroid credited with the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is likely to have originated from the outer half of the solar system's main asteroid belt, according to new research by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). Space.com reports: Known as the Chicxulub impactor, this large object has an estimated width of 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) and produced a crater in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula that spans 90 miles (145 kilometers). After its sudden contact with Earth, the asteroid wiped out not only the dinosaurs, but around 75 percent of the planet's animal species. It is widely accepted that this explosive force created was responsible for the mass extinction that ended the Mesozoic era. Researchers used computer models to analyse how asteroids are pulled from their orbit in different areas of the asteroid belt and drawn towards planets. The observations of 130,000 model asteroids, along with data and behaviour seen in other known impactors, found that objects are 10 times more likely to reach Earth from the outer asteroid belt than previously thought.

Prior to crashing into Earth, the extinction-causing asteroid orbited the sun with others, in the main asteroid belt. This concentrated band lies between planets Mars and Jupiter, with its contents usually kept in place by the forces of gravity. Before this study was released, scientists thought that very few of Earth's impactors escaped from the belt's outer half. But, researchers at SwRI discovered that "escape hatches" could be created by thermal forces, which pull more distant asteroids out of orbit and in the direction of Earth. The objects found in these outermost parts of the asteroid belt include many carbonaceous chondrite impactors. These are dark, porous and carbon-containing rocks which can also be found on Earth. Leading up to this research, other scientists have attempted to learn more about the object that doomed the dinosaurs. This included examinations of 66-million-year-old rocks. By doing this, geologists discovered that the Chicxulub asteroid had a similar composition to today's carbonaceous chondrites. By looking at wide timescales of the Chicxulub asteroid, the scientists could predict that a 6-mile asteroid is likely to come into contact with Earth once every 250 million years. Their model showed almost 50 percent of these significant impactors to be of the same carbonaceous chondrite composition. Details of the new study will be published in the November 2021 issue of the journal Icarus.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Scientists have come tantalizingly close to reproducing the power of the sun -- albeit only in a speck of hydrogen for a fraction of a second. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported on Tuesday that by using 192 gigantic lasers to annihilate a pellet of hydrogen, they were able to ignite a burst of more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power -- energy released when hydrogen atoms are fused into helium, the same process that occurs within stars. Indeed, Mark Herrmann, Livermore's deputy program director for fundamental weapons physics, compared the fusion reaction to the 170 quadrillion watts of sunshine that bathe Earth's surface. "This about 10 percent of that," Dr. Herrmann said. And all of the fusion energy emanated from a hot spot about as wide as a human hair, he said.

But the burst -- essentially a miniature hydrogen bomb -- lasted only 100-trillionths of a second. Still, that spurred a burst of optimism for fusion scientists who have long hoped that fusion could someday provide a boundless, clean energy source for humanity. The success also signified a moment of redemption for Livermore's football-stadium-size laser apparatus, which is named the National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F. Despite an investment of billions of dollars -- construction started in 1997 and operations began in 2009 -- the apparatus initially generated hardly any fusion at all. In 2014, Livermore scientists finally reported success, but the energy produced then was minuscule -- the equivalent of what a 60-watt light bulb consumes in five minutes. On Aug. 8, the burst of energy was much greater -- 70 percent as much as the energy of laser light hitting the hydrogen target. That is still a losing proposition as an energy source, consuming more power than it produces. But scientists are confident that further jumps in energy output were possible with fine-tuning of the experiment.

OneHundredAndTen writes: Pi is now known to 62.8 trillion decimal digits. Motherboard adds: Researchers in Switzerland broke the world record for the most accurate value of pi over the weekend, the team announced on Monday. They calculated the first 62.8 trillion digits, surpassing the former record by 12.8 trillion decimal points. Calculation first started in late April at the Competence Center for Data Analysis, Visualization and Simulation (DAViS) at the University of Applied Sciences in Graubünden, Switzerland. The calculated data was then backed up onto the high-performance computer where a Y-cruncher wrote it into the hexadecimal notation. It was then converted into the decimal system and verified by a mathematical algorithm

A new paper suggests Saturn's core is more like a fluid than a solid, and makes up more of the planet's interior than we thought. From a report: With its massive rings stretching out 175,000 miles in diameter, Saturn is a one-of-a-kind planet in the solar system. Turns out its insides are pretty unique as well. A new study published in Nature Astronomy on Monday suggests the sixth planet from the sun has a "fuzzy" core that jiggles around. It's quite a surprising find. "The conventional picture for Saturn or Jupiter's interior structure is that of a compact core of rocky or icy material, surrounded by a lower-density envelope of hydrogen and helium," says Christopher Mankovich, a planetary scientist at Caltech and coauthor of the new study, along with his colleague Jim Fuller.

What Mankovich and Fuller glimpsed "is essentially a blurred-out version of that conventional structure." Instead of seeing a tidy boundary dividing the heavier rocks and ice from the lighter elements, they found that the core is oscillating so that there is no single, clear separation. This diffuse core extends out to about 60% of Saturn's radius -- a huge leap from the 10 to 20% of a planet's radius that a traditional core would occupy. One of the wildest aspects of the study is that the findings did not come from measuring the core directly -- something we've never been able to do. Instead, Mankovich and Fuller turned to seismographic data on Saturn's rings first collected by NASA's Cassini mission, which explored the Saturnian system from 2004 to 2017.

"Saturn essentially rings like a bell at all times," says Mankovich. As the core wobbles, it creates gravitational perturbations that affect the surrounding rings, creating subtle "waves" that can be measured. When the planet's core was oscillating, Cassini was able to study Saturn's C ring (the second block of rings from the planet) and measure the small yet consistent gravitational "ringing" caused by the core. Mankovich and Fuller looked at the data and created a model for Saturn's structure that would explain these seismographic waves -- and the result is a fuzzy interior. "This study is the only direct evidence for a diffuse core structure in a fluid planet to date," says Mankovich.

Associated Press: U.S. health experts are expected to recommend COVID-19 booster shots for all Americans eight months after they get their second dose of the vaccine, to ensure longer-lasting protection as the delta variant spreads across the country. Federal health officials have been looking at whether extra shots for the vaccinated would be needed as early as this fall, reviewing case numbers in the U.S. as well as the situation in other countries such as Israel, where preliminary studies suggest the vaccine's protection against serious illness dropped among those vaccinated in January.

An announcement on the U.S. booster recommendation is expected as soon as this week, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Doses would only begin to be administered widely once the Food and Drug Administration formally approves the vaccines, which are being dispensed for now under what is known as emergency use authorization. Full approval of the Pfizer shot is expected in the coming weeks.

Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin brought its fight against NASA's Moon program to federal court on Monday, doubling down on accusations that the agency wrongly evaluated its lunar lander proposal. From a report: The complaint escalates a monthslong crusade by the company to win a chunk of lunar lander funds that was only given to its rival, Elon Musk's SpaceX and comes weeks after Blue Origin's first protest over the Moon program was squashed by a federal watchdog agency. Now in court, Blue Origin's challenge could add another pause to SpaceX's contract and a new lengthy delay to NASA's race to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024.

Blue Origin's complaint, filed with the US Court of Federal Claims, was shrouded behind a protective order. The company is broadly challenging NASA's decision to pick SpaceX for the lunar lander award, and "more specifically ... challenges NASA's unlawful and improper evaluation of proposals submitted under the HLS Option A BAA," according to its request to file its complaint under seal. Blue Origin was one of three firms vying for a contract to land NASA's first astronauts on the Moon since 1972. In April, NASA shelved the company's $5.9 billion proposal of its Blue Moon landing system and went with SpaceX's $2.9 billion Starship proposal instead, opting to pick just one company for the project after saying it might pick two. Limited funding from Congress only allowed one contract, NASA has argued.

A new study finds that eating fermented foods like yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut and kombucha increase the diverse of gut microbes — and "may also lead to lower levels of body-wide inflammation, which scientists increasingly link to a range of diseases tied to aging," reports the New York Times: The latest findings come from a study published in the journal Cell that was carried out by researchers at Stanford University. They wanted to see what impact fermented foods might have on the gut and immune system, and how it might compare to eating a relatively healthy diet full of fruits, vegetables, beans, whole grains and other fiber-rich foods... [Among the study's participants], the fermented food group showed marked reductions in 19 inflammatory compounds... For people in the fermented foods group, the reductions in inflammatory markers coincided with changes in their guts.

They began to harbor a wider and more diverse array of microbes, which is similar to what other recent studies of people who eat a variety of fermented foods have shown. The new research found that the more fermented foods people ate, the greater the number of microbial species that bloomed in their guts... Higher levels of gut microbiome diversity are generally thought to be a good thing. Studies have linked it to lower rates of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, metabolic disease and other ills...

Suzanne Devkota, the director of Microbiome Research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who was not involved in the new study, said it has long been assumed that eating fermented foods had health benefits but that the new research provides some of the first "hard evidence" that it can influence the gut and inflammation.

"A start-up founded by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says it is nearing a technological milestone that could take the world a step closer to fusion energy, which has eluded scientists for decades," reports the New York Times: Researchers at M.I.T.'s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and engineers at the company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, have begun testing an extremely powerful magnet that is needed to generate immense heat that can then be converted to electricity. It would open the gates toward what they believe could eventually be a fusion reactor... Though a fusion energy breakthrough remains elusive, it is still held out as one of the possible high-technology paths to ending reliance on fossil fuels. And some researchers believe that fusion research could finally take a leap forward this decade. More than two dozen private ventures in the United States, Europe, China and Australia and government-funded consortia are now investing heavily in efforts to build commercial fusion reactors. Total investment by people such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is edging toward $2 billion. The federal government is also spending about $600 million each year on fusion research, and there is a proposed amendment to add $1 billion to the Biden administration's infrastructure bill, said Andrew Holland, chief executive of the Fusion Industry Association...

Commonwealth's new magnet, which will be one of the world's most powerful, will be a crucial component in a compact nuclear fusion reactor known as a Tokamak, a design that uses magnetic forces to compress plasma until it is hotter than the sun... Commonwealth Fusion executives claim that the magnet is a significant technology breakthrough that will make Tokamak designs commercially viable for the first time. They say they are not yet ready to test their reactor prototype, but the researchers are finishing the magnet and hope it will be workable by 2025...

Commonwealth, which has raised more than $250 million so far and employs 150 people, received a significant boost last year when physicists at M.I.T.'s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and the company published seven peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Plasma Physics explaining that the reactor will work as planned. What remains to be proved is that the Commonwealth prototype reactor can produce more energy than it consumes, an ability that physicists define as Q greater than 1. The company is hoping that its prototype, when complete, will produce 10 times the energy it consumes.
Commonwealth's chief executive (also a plasma physicist) explains to the Times how fusion energy is different than other sources: because it really doesn't require any resources. "You add up all the costs, the cost of normal stuff like concrete and steel, and it will make as much power as a gas plant, but without having to pay for the gas."

A study of 6,400 people "from eight days old up to age 95, in 29 countries," finds that the human metabolism "peaks at the age of one, is stable from 20 to 60 and then inexorably declines," writes the BBC.

Long-time Slashdot reader Hope Thelps shares their report: The study, published in the journal Science, found four phases of metabolic life:

- birth to age one, when the metabolism shifts from being the same as the mother's to a lifetime high 50% above that of adults

- a gentle slowdown until the age of 20, with no spike during all the changes of puberty

- no change at all between the ages of 20 and 60

- a permanent decline, with yearly falls that, by 90, leave metabolism 26% lower than in mid-life
"The most surprising thing for me," one of the researchers tells the BBC, "is there is no change throughout adulthood — if you are experiencing mid-life spread you can no longer blame it on a declining metabolic rate."

Science magazine's headline? "Little kids burn so much energy, they're like a different species, study finds." [T]he first comprehensive study of energy use over the human life span has quantified their burn rate: Infants between the ages of 9 and 15 months expend a stunning 50% more energy in 1 day than adults do, adjusted for body size. These wee dynamos consume and use up energy even faster than pregnant women and teenage boys, most likely to fuel their energetically expensive brains and organs. "Little people are not burning energy like small adults," says Duke University evolutionary biologist Herman Pontzer, who led the new analysis of data from around the world. "They are burning energy superfast ... like a different species."

Long-time Slashdot reader Pieroxy is working on a new open source project, a web-based version of the system-monitoring software Conky.

The ultimate goal is send the data to an HTML interface "to find some use for the old iPads/tablets/laptops we all have lying around. You can put them next to your screen and have your metrics displayed there...!"

There's just one problem: "I had to come up with a way for users to format a number." I needed a small string the user could write to describe exactly what they want to do with their number. Some examples can be: write it as a 3-digit number suffixed by SI prefixes when the numbers are too big or too small, display a timestamp as HH:MM string, or just the day of week, eventually cut to the first three characters, do the same with a timestamp in milliseconds, or nanoseconds, display a nice string out of a number of seconds to express a duration ("3h 12mn 17s"), pad the number with spaces so that all numbers are aligned (left or right), force a fixed number of digits after the decimal point, etc.

In other words, I was looking for a "universal" way of formatting numbers and failed to find any kind of standard online.

Do Slashdot readers know of such a thing or should I create my own?

In 1999 Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Hiltzik won a Pulitzer Prize. Now a business columnist for the Times, he writes that Ivermectin, "the latest supposed treatment for COVID-19 being touted by anti-vaccination groups, had 'no effect whatsoever' on the disease, according to a large patient study." (Alternate URL here) That's the conclusion of the Together Trial, which has subjected several purported nonvaccine treatments for COVID-19 to carefully designed clinical testing.

The trial is supervised by McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and conducted in Brazil. One of the trial's principal investigators, Edward Mills of McMaster, presented the results from the Ivermectin arms of the study at an Aug. 6 symposium sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Among the 1,500 patients in the study, he said, Ivermectin showed "no effect whatsoever" on the trial's outcome goals — whether patients required extended observation in the emergency room or hospitalization. "In our specific trial," he said, "we do not see the treatment benefit that a lot of the advocates believe should have been" seen...

The Ivermectin camp, as I reported earlier, is heavily peopled by anti-vaccination advocates and conspiracy mongers. They maintain that the truth about the drug has been suppressed by agents of the pharmaceutical industry, which ostensibly prefers to collect the more generous profits that will flow from COVID vaccines. The problem, however, is that the scientific trials cited by Ivermectin advocates have been too small or poorly documented to prove their case. One large trial from Egypt that showed the most significant therapeutic effect was withdrawn from its publishers due to accusations of plagiarism and bogus data. Nevertheless, the advocates have continued to press their case — without necessarily observing accepted standards of scientific discourse. During the symposium, Mills complained that serious researchers looking into claims for COVID treatments have faced unprecedented abuse from advocates.

"I've had enough abuse and so have the other clinical trialists doing Ivermectin," he said. "Others working in this area have been threatened, their families have been threatened, they've been defamed," he said...

Asked whether he expected further criticism from Ivermectin advocates, he said it was all but inevitable. "The advocacy groups have set themselves up to be able to critique any clinical trial. They've already determined that any valid, well-designed critical trial was set up to fail."

Boeing's Starliner astronaut capsule won't be launching to the International Space Station until it's gone through "deeper-level troubleshooting" to fix an issue with stuck propulsion system valves, according to a press release from the company. That troubleshooting means removing the capsule from the Atlas V rocket it's been coupled to and bringing it back to Boeing's facility. The Verge reports: The spacecraft's initial launch attempt late last month was scrubbed hours before liftoff after engineers noticed a group of fuel valves in the Starliner's propulsion section weren't positioned as programmed. That valve issue, whose cause remains a mystery, is the latest engineering predicament to curse Starliner nearly two years after the capsule failed its first attempt to reach the space station in 2019. With a clear fix to the valve issue still elusive, having to take Starliner back to the hangar will push Boeing's plans to launch this month off the table, and a logjam of other scheduled flights could extend the delay by several months.

According to Boeing VP John Vollmer, the company will "continue to work the issue from the Starliner factory and have decided to stand down for this launch window to make way for other national priority missions." The new launch date will have to be jointly decided by NASA, Boeing, and the United Launch Alliance after the issue with the valves has been found and fixed. Boeing has said software isn't to blame for Starliner's new valve problem, and indicated in past statements that it's a more complex hardware issue.

"San Francisco became the the first major US city to mandate proof of full vaccinations for certain indoor activities Thursday," reports CNN. Earlier this month, New York City announced a similar requirement, but it's only requiring workers and patrons have at least one vaccine dose administered. CNN reports: City residents age 12 and older will now be required to show proof they have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 in order to enter indoor restaurants, bars, gyms and theaters, as well as large event spaces with at least 1,000 people, according to an announcement from Mayor London Breed. The new mandate is scheduled to go into effect August 20.

"We know that for our city to bounce back from the pandemic and thrive, we need to use the best method we have to fight COVID-19 and that's vaccines," Breed said in a statement. "Many San Francisco businesses are already leading the way by requiring proof of vaccination for their customers because they care about the health of their employees, their customers, and this City." The San Francisco health order also beefs up a state order mandating vaccines for health care workers by extending the directive to pharmacists, dental offices, home health aides and residential care centers.

When a World Health Organization-led team traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, a top official said he was worried about safety standards at a laboratory close to the seafood market where the first human cases were detected, according to a documentary released Thursday by Danish television channel TV2. The Associated Press reports: The Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses "without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows," Peter Ben Embarek said during a conference call in January, according to footage shown by TV2. Ben Embarek is a WHO expert on disease transmission from animals to humans and one of the team's leaders. But months later, when WHO released its dense report on its mission to Wuhan, the U.N. health agency concluded that a leak of the virus from the lab was "extremely unlikely" to have caused COVID-19. The WHO report even lent credence to a fringe theory promoted by the Chinese government that the virus may have been spread via frozen seafood packaging.

In recent weeks, however, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has acknowledged it was "premature" to rule out a possible lab leak as the source of COVID-19, saying last month that he was asking China to be more transparent about the early days of the pandemic. "I was a lab technician myself. I'm an immunologist and I have worked in the lab and lab accidents happen," Tedros said. "It's common." In the Danish TV2 documentary, the WHO's Ben Embarek is pictured arriving in China, inspecting the stalls at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan and examining what he hypothesizes might have been living quarters for people who handled live animals there -- raising the possibility that the virus may have jumped from animals to people at the market. "It would mean that the contact between the human beings and whatever may have been in the market i.e. virus and maybe live animals would have been more intense," Ben Embarek said. "It goes without saying that the close contact would be doubled many times between humans and animals if you are among them around the clock."

The Danish documentary also featured Ben Embarek expressing his worries in January about the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, concerns that have never been publicly disclosed by WHO. While numerous experts have questioned whether there might have been a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology -- where scientists were studying coronaviruses -- there has been less interest in another nearby facility. "What is more concerning to me is the other lab," Ben Embarek said. "The one that is next to the market," he explained, referring to the Wuhan branch of the Chinese CDC, located just 500 meters (547 yards) away from the Huanan market. In a June interview, Ben Embarek told TV2 that the possibility of a lab staffer being infected with the coronavirus while collecting bat samples was "likely."

According to a new study published in the journal Science, feeding supermassive black holes emit a noticeable flickering light that is directly related to their mass. "The researchers describe the flickering as the black hole equivalent of a burp," reports CNET. "It's the 'burps' that could help us come to terms with the relative sizes of not only supermassive black holes but also accreting white dwarfs and -- hopefully -- intermediate-mass black holes, or IMBHs, which are thought to have formed throughout the history of the universe but are rare and hard to find." From the report: When dormant, supermassive black holes are typically quite dull and don't emit much light. When active and feeding, however, they produce a pattern of flickering light we can detect from across the universe, ranging from hours to decades. "There have been many studies that explored possible relations of the observed flickering and the mass of the SMBH, but the results have been inconclusive and sometimes controversial," said Colin Burke, an astronomy graduate student and lead author of the study.

The team, led by Burke, analyzed the variability patterns to identify a characteristic timescale, allowing them to equate the flickering patterns with the mass of a supermassive black hole. When it comes to these active, feeding supermassive black holes, shorter timescales of flickering indicate a smaller black hole, while longer timescales indicate more massive black holes. [...] "Now that there is a correlation between the flickering pattern and the mass of the central accreting object, we can use it to predict what the flickering signal from an IMBH might look like," Burke said.

Despite working on next-generation suits for years, they won't be ready until 2025 at the earliest, an inspector general determined. From a report: Ever since the White House directed NASA to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 as part of its Artemis program, there have been all sorts of daunting challenges: The rocket the space agency would use has suffered setbacks and delays; the spacecraft that would land astronauts on the surface is not yet completed and was held up by the losing bidders; and Congress hasn't come through with the funding NASA says is necessary. But another reason the 2024 goal may not be met is that the spacesuits needed by the astronauts to walk on the lunar surface won't be ready in time and the total development program, which ultimately will produce just two flight-ready suits, could cost more than $1 billion.

The NASA Inspector General said in a report Tuesday that the suits have been delayed by almost two years because of funding shortfalls, impacts from the coronavirus pandemic and technical challenges. As a result, the government watchdog concluded that the suits would not be ready until 2025 at the earliest and that "a lunar landing in late 2024 as NASA currently plans is not feasible." NASA has been working on next-generation spacesuits, which act as mini spaceships that protect the astronauts from the vacuum of space, for 14 years, the IG said. In 2016, NASA decided to consolidate two spacesuit designs into a single program that it would oversee. By 2017, the agency had spent $200 million and since then has spent an additional $220 million, the IG found. While it took the program in-house, parts for the suits are still supplied by 27 contractors.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been orbiting an asteroid called Bennu for more than two years to fine-tune the agency's existing models of its trajectory. "As a result, scientists behind new research now say they're confident that the asteroid's total impact probability through 2300 is just 1 in 1,750," reports Space.com. From the report: Estimates produced before OSIRIS-REx arrived at the space rock tallied the cumulative probability of a Bennu impact between the years 2175 and 2199 at 1 in 2,700, according to NASA. While a slightly higher risk than past estimates, it represents a minuscule change in an already minuscule risk, NASA said. Technically, that's a small increase in risk, but the scientists behind the new research say they aren't worried about a potential impact. And besides, the lessons the research offers for asteroid trajectory calculation could reduce concerns about potential impacts by other asteroids more than enough to compensate.

"The impact probability went up just a little bit but it's not a significant change, the impact probability is pretty much the same," lead author Davide Farnocchia, who works at NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies in California, said during a news conference held Wednesday (Aug. 11). "I think that, overall, the situation has improved."

The National Institutes of Health is giving a booster dose to 200 kidney transplant patients who did not have an immune response to the COVID-19 vaccine in a new trial that launched yesterday. From a report: Many transplant patients, who have to take immunosuppressant drugs to keep their bodies from rejecting a new organ, don't produce enough antibodies -- or don't produce antibodies at all -- after getting the COVID-19 vaccine. The study will check to see if a third shot of an mRNA vaccine, given on top of the normal two-shot regimen, will generate antibodies closer to the levels seen in healthy people.

There are some indications that a third dose might help some people. In France, health officials started recommending in April that immunosuppressed patients get a third shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. Half of the patients who did not respond to two shots produced antibodies after the third, according to an analysis of 159 kidney transplant patients. The other half, though, still had no response. In Germany, one study of 48 transplant patients found that 40 percent who didn't respond to two doses had a response after the third. Two other trials looking at kidney transplant patients are also kicking off in Israel and Switzerland.