An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: An initial CIA investigation into the mysterious set of symptoms known as Havana syndrome has found that it is unlikely to be the result of a worldwide campaign of attacks by a foreign power against US diplomats and spies. However, two dozen cases, including some of those originally afflicted in Havana in 2016, could not be explained and would be further studied for evidence of a possible attack, according to a senior CIA official who briefed the US press.

"While we have reached some significant interim findings, we are not done," the CIA director, Williams Burns, said in a statement. "We will continue the mission to investigate these incidents and provide access to world-class care for those who need it." Since the original outbreak of the symptoms, which include hearing strange sounds, dizziness, loss of balance, nausea and memory loss, more than 1,000 cases have been studied around the world. The interim findings of a CIA investigation have found that the majority of cases could probably be attributed to a pre-existing medical condition, or environmental factors, or stress, the senior official said. The defense department and an independent panel of experts are conducting their own investigations which have yet to publish reports. A Havana syndrome victims support group said in a statement: "The decision to release the report now and with this particular set of 'findings' seems a breach of faith, and an undermining of the intent of Congress and the president to stand with us and reach a government-wide consensus as to what is behind this," a Havana syndrome victims group said in a statement.

"This report was neither cleared nor coordinated through the interagency and must stand as the assessment of one agency [CIA] alone."

Elon Musk's brain implant company Neuralink is now hiring a clinical trial director, an indication that the company's longstanding goal of implanting chips in human brains is coming closer. Bloomberg: The trial director position would oversee the startup's long-promised human trials of its medical device, according to the listing. Neuralink's brain implant -- which Musk has said already allows monkeys to play video games with their thoughts alone -- is intended to help treat a variety of neurological disorders, such as paralysis. The job description for the position, based in Fremont, California, promises that the applicant will "work closely with some of the most innovative doctors and top engineers" as well as with "Neuralink's first Clinical Trial participants." It also indicates that the job will mean leading and building "the team responsible for enabling Neuralink's clinical research activities," as well as adhering to regulations. Last month, Musk told the Wall Street Journal that Neuralink hoped to implant its device in human brains sometime in 2022.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Antimicrobial resistance poses a significant threat to humanity, health leaders have warned, as a study reveals it has become a leading cause of death worldwide and is killing about 3,500 people every day. More than 1.2 million -- and potentially millions more -- died in 2019 as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, according to the most comprehensive estimate to date of the global impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The stark analysis covering more than 200 countries and territories was published in the Lancet. It says AMR is killing more people than HIV/Aids or malaria. Many hundreds of thousands of deaths are occurring due to common, previously treatable infections, the study says, because bacteria that cause them have become resistant to treatment.

The new Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (Gram) report estimates deaths linked to 23 pathogens and 88 pathogen-drug combinations across 204 countries and territories in 2019. Statistical modeling was used to produce estimates of the impact of AMR in all locations -- including those with no data -- using more than 470m individual records obtained from systematic literature reviews, hospital systems, surveillance systems, and other data sources. The analysis shows AMR was directly responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths worldwide, and associated with an estimated 4.95 million deaths, in 2019. HIV/Aids and malaria have been estimated to have caused 860,000 and 640,000 deaths, respectively, in 2019. While AMR poses a threat to people of all ages, young children were found to be at particularly high risk, with one in five deaths attributable to AMR occurring in children under the age of five. Some of the actions policymakers can take, as mentioned in the report, include "optimizing the use of existing antibiotics, taking greater action to monitor and control infections, and providing more funding to develop new antibiotics and treatments."

A quick and pain-free scan of the human eyeball could one day help doctors identify "fast agers," who are at greater risk of early mortality. ScienceAlert reports: A machine learning model has now been taught to predict a person's years of life simply by looking at their retina, which is the tissue at the back of the eye. The algorithm is so accurate, it could predict the age of nearly 47,000 middle-aged and elderly adults in the United Kingdom within a bracket of 3.5 years. Just over a decade after these retinas were scanned, 1,871 individuals had died, and those who had older-looking retinas were more likely to fall in this group.

For instance, if the algorithm predicted a person's retina was a year older than their actual age, their risk of death from any cause in the next 11 years went up by 2 percent. At the same time, their risk of death from a cause other than cardiovascular disease or cancer went up by 3 percent. The findings are purely observational, which means we still don't know what is driving this relationship at a biological level. Nevertheless, the results support growing evidence that the retina is highly sensitive to the damages of aging. Because this visible tissue hosts both blood vessels and nerves, it could tell us important information about an individual's vascular and brain health. The study was published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.

Over the past 450 million years, life on Earth has been devastated by at least five mass extinctions, which are typically defined as catastrophes that wipe out more than 75 percent of species in a short amount of time. Many scientists have proposed that we are entering a Sixth Mass Extinction, this time driven by human activity, though debates still rage over the validity and consequences of this claim. From a report: Now, a team led by Robert Cowie, research professor at the University of Hawaii's Pacific Biosciences Research Center, argues that "the Sixth Mass Extinction has begun on land and in freshwater seems increasingly likely," according to a recent article published in Biological Reviews. "We consider that the Sixth Mass Extinction has probably started and present arguments to counter those who would deny this," said the team, which also included biologists Philippe Bouchet and Benoît Fontaine of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France, in the article.

"Denying it is simply flying in the face of the mountain of data that is rapidly accumulating, and there is no longer room for skepticism, wondering whether it really is happening," added the authors. Cowie and his colleagues refer to a multitude of studies cataloging the extinction of species across clades, but the article is primarily built around their research into mollusks, an invertebrate family that includes snails, clams, and slugs. This focus counteracts the disproportionate attention that vertebrates, such as birds and mammals, receive in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, among other conservation efforts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: [...] Together, these furry duplicates are normalizing the world of animal cloning -- and they could be ushering in an era of petfluencer immortality. "Someone could clone their pet and replace the original. The world doesn't have to know. They may never know," says Melain Rodriguez, client service manager at ViaGen, which is behind the cloning of all the animals mentioned in this article. "Especially if it's one that looks exactly the same and they can just continue with that pet." (Rodriguez notes that the cloned pets aren't "reincarnations" and will have different personalities than their predecessors.)

The process, however, is complicated and expensive. The price tag for cloning a pet ranges anywhere from $35,000 to $50,000, depending on the animal. "It's very similar to IVF," explains Rodriguez. "The eggs and the embryos are created in a dish, and then they're transferred into the surrogate." She adds that customers often stomach the cost due to the emotions involved: "If you've ever had a wonderful pet that you love so much, it's so hard to lose them. A lot of our clients are in that situation."

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to unveil its measure of how close human civilisation is to the edge of extinction. From a report: On 24 October 1962, an American nuclear chemist, Harrison Brown, started to pen a guest editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just as the Cuban missile crisis reached its climax. "I am writing on a plane en route from Los Angeles to Washington and for all I know this editorial ... may never be published," Brown said. "Never in history have people and nations been so close to death and destruction on such a vast scale. Midnight is upon us." With this dire warning, he was referring to the Doomsday Clock, which has been the Bulletin's iconic motif since it was founded 75 years ago by Albert Einstein and some of the University of Chicago scientists from the Manhattan Project. Their work had contributed to making the atomic bomb, but many of them had been outraged when the US used it against Japanese cities.

The image of the clock ticking away to midnight was intended to convey the sense of urgent peril, which Brown felt so viscerally on that 1962 flight to Washington. "He thought the world could end while he was on that flight," said Rachel Bronson, the Bulletin's current president. On Thursday, the Doomsday Clock will be unveiled for the 75th time, and we will find out what way the Bulletin's panel of scientists and security experts will move the minute hand. For the past two years it has been stuck at 100 seconds to midnight. With Russia poised to attack Ukraine, it is hard to imagine the clock being set back, and that means that the experts assess we are in greater danger now than ever. The closest the clock came at the height of the cold war was two minutes to midnight in 1953 after the first detonation of a thermonuclear warhead, a hydrogen bomb. By the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the hands were at seven minutes to, but despite Brown's apocalyptic editorial, the Bulletin decided not to move them forward because the shock of near catastrophe had given Washington and Moscow fresh incentive to work towards risk reduction and arms control.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via MIT Technology Review: Biologists at several startups are applying the latest advances in genetic engineering to the age-old problem of baldness, creating new hair-forming cells that could restore a person's ability to grow hair. Some researchers tell MIT Technology Review they are using the techniques to grow human hair cells in their labs and even on animals. A startup called dNovo sent us a photograph of a mouse sprouting a dense clump of human hair -- the result of a transplant of what the company says are human hair stem cells. The company's founder is Ernesto Lujan, a Stanford University -- trained biologist. He says his company can produce the components of hair follicles by genetically "reprogramming" ordinary cells, like blood or fat cells. More work needs to be done, but Lujan is hopeful that the technology could eventually treat "the underlying cause of hair loss."

According to NASA researchers, the power of a massive volcanic eruption that took place on Saturday near the island nation of Tonga was equivalent to around 10 megatons of TNT. "That means the explosive force was more than 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II," reports NPR. From the report: The blast was heard as far away as Alaska and was probably one of the loudest events to occur on Earth in over a century, according to Michael Poland, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. "This might be the loudest eruption since [the eruption of the Indonesian volcano] Krakatau in 1883," Poland says. That massive 19th-century eruption killed thousands and released so much ash that it cast much of the region into darkness.

But for all its explosive force, the eruption itself was actually relatively small, according to Poland, of the U.S. Geological Survey. Unlike the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which spewed ash and smoke for hours, the events at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai lasted less than 60 minutes. He does not expect that the eruption will cause any short-term changes to Earth's climate, the way other large eruptions have in the past. In fact, Poland says, the real mystery is how such a relatively small eruption could create such a big bang and tsunami.

The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said. The Guardian reports: Plastics are of particularly high concern, they said, along with 350,000 synthetic chemicals including pesticides, industrial compounds and antibiotics. Plastic pollution is now found from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and some toxic chemicals, such as PCBs, are long-lasting and widespread. The study concludes that chemical pollution has crossed a "planetary boundary", the point at which human-made changes to the Earth push it outside the stable environment of the last 10,000 years.

Determining whether chemical pollution has crossed a planetary boundary is complex because there is no pre-human baseline, unlike with the climate crisis and the pre-industrial level of CO2 in the atmosphere. There are also a huge number of chemical compounds registered for use -- about 350,000 -- and only a tiny fraction of these have been assessed for safety. So the research used a combination of measurements to assess the situation. These included the rate of production of chemicals, which is rising rapidly, and their release into the environment, which is happening much faster than the ability of authorities to track or investigate the impacts. The well-known negative effects of some chemicals, from the extraction of fossil fuels to produce them to their leaking into the environment, were also part of the assessment. The scientists acknowledged the data was limited in many areas, but said the weight of evidence pointed to a breach of the planetary boundary. [...] The researchers said stronger regulation was needed and in the future a fixed cap on chemical production and release, in the same way carbon targets aim to end greenhouse gas emissions. Their study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. "The rise of the chemical burden in the environment is diffuse and insidious," said Prof Sir Ian Boyd at the University of St Andrews. "Even if the toxic effects of individual chemicals can be hard to detect, this does not mean that the aggregate effect is likely to be insignificant."

"Regulation is not designed to detect or understand these effects. We are relatively blind to what is going on as a result. In this situation, where we have a low level of scientific certainty about effects, there is a need for a much more precautionary approach to new chemicals and to the amount being emitted to the environment."

Runaway success and underfunding have led to growing pains for the preprint server. From a report: What started in 1989 as an e-mail list for a few dozen string theorists has now grown to a collection of more than two million papers -- and the central hub for physicists, astronomers, computer scientists, mathematicians and other researchers. On January 3 the preprint server arXiv.org crossed the milestone with a numerical analysis paper entitled "Affine Iterations and Wrapping Effect: Various Approaches." (The Library of Alexandria, for comparison, is believed to have contained no more than hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.) "We're a way for authors to communicate their research results quickly and freely," says Steinn Sigurdsson, a professor of astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University and arXiv's scientific director. Unlike traditional scientific journals, arXiv (pronounced "archive" because the "X" represents the Greek letter chi) allows scientists to share research before it has been peer-reviewed.

When submitting to traditional journals, authors frequently wait half a year or more to publish; papers typically appear on arXiv within a day. Authors often submit manuscripts to arXiv and then subsequently publish them in a peer-reviewed journal, but increasingly, papers are released on arXiv alone. Beyond traditional manuscripts, arXiv also contains white papers, historical overviews and even cheeky April Fools' Day papers. "It's like the backbone for our field," says Alex Kohls, head of the Scientific Information Service at CERN, the world's premier organization for particle physics research, located near Geneva.

"It's not only a tool for physicists and computer scientists -- it has had an impact on the overall scholarly communication process." For instance, arXiv-inspired preprint servers in the life sciences, such as bioRxiv and medRxiv, have proved invaluable for speeding up biomedical research during the coronavirus pandemic. Growth has been explosive. In 2008, 17 years after it went online, arXiv hit 500,000 papers. By late 2014 that total had doubled to one million. Seven years later arXiv has doubled its library again but continues to grapple with its role: Is it closer to a selective academic journal or more like an online warehouse that indiscriminately collects papers? Amid this confusion, some researchers are concerned about arXiv's moderation policies, which they say lack transparency and have led to papers being unfairly rejected or misclassified. At the same time, arXiv is struggling to improve the diversity of its moderators, who are predominantly men based at U.S. institutions.

A team of astronomers has used archival images from a survey telescope to look for Starlink tracks over the past two years. Over that time, the number of images affected rose by a factor of 35, and the researchers estimate that by the time the planned Starlink constellation is complete, pretty much every image from their hardware will have at least one track in it. Ars Technica reports: SpaceX's Starlink Internet service will require a dense constellation of satellites to provide consistent, low-latency connectivity. The system already has over 1,500 satellites in orbit and has received approval to operate 12,000 of them. And that has astronomers worried. Although SpaceX has taken steps to reduce the impact of its hardware, there's no way to completely eliminate the tracks the satellites leave across ground-based observations. [...] In response to complaints from the astronomy community, SpaceX put visors on later generations of Starlink satellites. The research team was able to compare the visibility of these different generations and found that the visors worked -- satellites with visors dropped in brightness by a factor of roughly 4.6 (the precise number depended upon the wavelength). The visibility, however, was still higher than the target set at a workshop that was meant to address this issue.

Because these tracks are small and software already identifies and handles them, they don't have much of an effect on observations. The researchers estimate that, at present, there's only a 0.04 percent chance that a rare event will be missed because it coincides with a track. But because the problem is most acute in twilight observations, it's more likely to impact searches for objects within the Solar System. This would include comets and asteroids -- including asteroids that originated around other stars. But again, the problem is likely to get worse. SpaceX already has approval to increase the number of Starlink satellites to well over 10,000; the authors estimate that at 10,000, every image at twilight will likely contain a Starlink track. SpaceX has indicated it would eventually like to boost the numbers to over 40,000 satellites, at which point all twilight images are likely to have four tracks.

And SpaceX isn't the only company planning on this sort of satellite service. If all the companies involved follow through on their plans, low Earth orbit could see as many as 100,000 of these satellites. Overall, the picture is mixed. The ZTF's main mission -- to pick out rare events caused by distant, energetic phenomena -- is largely unaffected by the growing number of satellite tracks. And because the percentage of events is currently small, tripling the number of satellites won't have a dramatic impact on observations. But a secondary science mission is already seeing a lot of light contamination, and matters are only going to get worse. The findings have been published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

After analyzing powdered rock samples collected from the surface of Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover, scientists today announced that several of the samples are rich in a type of carbon that on Earth is associated with biological processes. From a report: While the finding is intriguing, it doesn't necessarily point to ancient life on Mars, as scientists have not yet found conclusive supporting evidence of ancient or current biology there, such as sedimentary rock formations produced by ancient bacteria, or a diversity of complex organic molecules formed by life. In a report of their findings to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on January 18, Curiosity scientists offer several explanations for the unusual carbon signals they detected. Their hypotheses are drawn partly from carbon signatures on Earth, but scientists warn the two planets are so different they can't make definitive conclusions based on Earth examples.

The biological explanation Curiosity scientists present in their paper is inspired by Earth life. It involves ancient bacteria in the surface that would have produced a unique carbon signature as they released methane into the atmosphere where ultraviolet light would have converted that gas into larger, more complex molecules. These new molecules would have rained down to the surface and now could be preserved with their distinct carbon signature in Martian rocks.

Two other hypotheses offer nonbiological explanations. One suggests the carbon signature could have resulted from the interaction of ultraviolet light with carbon dioxide gas in the Martian atmosphere, producing new carbon-containing molecules that would have settled to the surface. And the other speculates that the carbon could have been left behind from a rare event hundreds of millions of years ago when the solar system passed through a giant molecular cloud rich in the type of carbon detected.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: For the first time, a team of scientists has now demonstrated the quantum mechanical principle of superabsorption that underpins quantum batteries in a proof-of-concept device. "Superabsorption is a quantum collective effect where transitions between the states of the molecules interfere constructively," James Quach, corresponding author of the study, told New Atlas. "Constructive interference occurs in all kinds of waves (light, sound, waves on water), and occurs when different waves add up to give a larger effect than either wave on its own. Crucially this allows the combined molecules to absorb light more efficiently than if each molecule were acting individually." In a quantum battery, this phenomenon would have a very clear benefit. The more energy-storing molecules you have, the more efficiently they'll be able to absorb that energy -- in other words, the bigger you make the battery, the faster it will charge. At least, that's how it should work in theory. Superabsorption had yet to be demonstrated on a scale large enough to build quantum batteries, but the new study has now managed just that.

To build their test device, the researchers placed an active layer of light-absorbing molecules -- a dye known as Lumogen-F Orange -- in a microcavity between two mirrors. "The mirrors in this microcavity were made using a standard method to make high quality mirrors," explained Quach. "This is to use alternating layers of dielectric materials -- silicon dioxide and niobium pentoxide -- to create what is known as a 'distributed Bragg reflector.' This produces mirrors which reflect much more of the light than a typical metal/glass mirror. This is important as we want light to stay inside the cavity as long as possible." The team then used ultrafast transient-absorption spectroscopy to measure how the dye molecules were storing the energy and how fast the whole device was charging. And sure enough, as the size of the microcavity and the number of molecules increased, the charging time decreased, demonstrating superabsorption at work. "The idea here is a proof-of-principle that enhanced absorption of light is possible in such a device," Quach told New Atlas. "The key challenge though is to bridge the gap between the proof-of-principle here for a small device, and exploiting the same ideas in larger usable devices. The next steps are to explore how this can be combined with other ways of storing and transferring energy, to provide a device that could be practically useful."

The research was published in the journal Science Advances.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Insider: Officials in Beijing are telling people to avoid international mail and to open their packages outdoors and with gloves, saying cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant could have spread through foreign mail. Experts have repeatedly said that there is little risk of getting the coronavirus from mail. There is no indication that this has changed with the Omicron variant, though it is more infectious. But Robin Brant, the BBC's China correspondent, tweeted on Monday that Beijing was telling residents not to order goods from abroad, and to open packages outside with gloves and a mask on. The South China Morning Post also reported on Monday that Beijing's center for disease control and prevention said that people should order as little as possible from abroad, and that people should wear gloves and masks when opening any mail from high-risk countries. It comes as the center said the first recorded case of the Omicron variant in Beijing could have entered via mail. Officials in Beijing say the man who was infected was sent mail from Canada on January 7. They claim to have detected the Omicron variant on the letter.

Canada's post office notes that the risk of the coronavirus spreading via mail is low as it doesn't live long on surfaces.

A fourth dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was insufficient to prevent infection with the omicron variant of Covid-19, according to preliminary data from a trial in Israel released Monday. Bloomberg reports: Two weeks after the start of the trial of 154 medical personnel at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, researchers found the vaccine successfully raised antibody levels. But that only offered a partial defense against omicron, according to Gili Regev-Yochay, the trial's lead researcher. Vaccines which were more effective against previous variants offer less protection with omicron, she said. Still, those infected in the trial had only slight symptoms or none at all.

Israel started rolling out the fourth dose of the vaccine to the over-60s and immunocompromised in late December amid a surge in cases. Since then, more than half a million Israelis have received the extra dose, according to the Health Ministry. The decision to give the fourth vaccine to the most vulnerable was the correct one, Regev-Yochay said at a virtual press conference, since it may have given additional benefit against omicron. But she added the results didn't support a wider rollout to the whole population.

Following weeks of soaring infections, the latest Covid surge is showing signs of slowing in a handful of areas hit earliest by the omicron variant -- offering a glimmer of hope that this wave is starting to ease. From a report: The U.S. has reported an average of nearly 800,000 cases per day over the past week, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, more than three times the level seen during last winter's previous record. But in a handful of states and cities, particularly on the East Coast, cases appear to have plateaued or fallen in recent days. In New York, the seven-day average of daily new cases has been declining since hitting a record high of 85,000 per day on Jan. 9, according to Hopkins data. Cases there doubled during a number of seven-day periods in late December and early January, but are down sharply from last week to an average of 51,500. In New York City, average daily cases have fallen by 31% over the past week, state health department data shows. "There will come a time when we can say it's all over," Gov. Kathy Hochul said at a press conference Friday. "We're not there yet, but boy, it's on the horizon and we've waited a long time for that." New York is still reporting a high level of daily infections, ranking 15th out of all states, according to a CNBC analysis of population-adjusted case counts, down from the second-most just a few days ago. New Jersey also recently fell out of the top five, now ranking 20th, as the state has seen a 32% drop in average daily cases over the past week.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot wanted to share this New York Times article which makes the point that "The stunning Covid vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drew upon long-buried discoveries made in the hopes of ending past epidemics..." They remain a marvel: Even as the Omicron variant fuels a new wave of the pandemic, the vaccines have proved remarkably resilient at defending against severe illness and death. And the manufacturers, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, say that mRNA technology will allow them to adapt the vaccines quickly, to fend off whatever dangerous new version of the virus that evolution brings next.

Skeptics have seized on the rapid development of the vaccines — among the most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era — to undermine the public's trust in them. But the breakthroughs behind the vaccines unfolded over decades, little by little, as scientists across the world pursued research in disparate areas, never imagining their work would one day come together to tame the pandemic of the century. The pharmaceutical companies harnessed these findings and engineered a consistent product that could be made at scale, partly with the help of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's multibillion-dollar program to hasten the development and manufacture of vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests to fight the new virus.

For years, though, the scientists who made the vaccines possible scrounged for money and battled public indifference. Their experiments often failed. When the work got too crushing, some of them left it behind. And yet on this unpredictable, zigzagging path, the science slowly built upon itself, squeezing knowledge from failure.

The vaccines were possible only because of efforts in three areas. The first began more than 60 years ago with the discovery of mRNA, the genetic molecule that helps cells make proteins. A few decades later, two scientists in Pennsylvania decided to pursue what seemed like a pipe dream: using the molecule to command cells to make tiny pieces of viruses that would strengthen the immune system. The second effort took place in the private sector, as biotechnology companies in Canada in the budding field of gene therapy — the modification or repair of genes to treat diseases — searched for a way to protect fragile genetic molecules so they could be safely delivered to human cells. The third crucial line of inquiry began in the 1990s, when the U.S. government embarked on a multibillion-dollar quest to find a vaccine to prevent AIDS. That effort funded a group of scientists who tried to target the all-important "spikes" on H.I.V. viruses that allow them to invade cells. The work has not resulted in a successful H.I.V. vaccine. But some of these researchers, including Dr. Graham, veered from the mission and eventually unlocked secrets that allowed the spikes on coronaviruses to be mapped instead.

In early 2020, these different strands of research came together. The spike of the Covid virus was encoded in mRNA molecules. Those molecules were wrapped in a protective layer of fat and poured into small glass vials. When the shots went in arms less than a year later, recipients' cells responded by producing proteins that resembled the spikes — and that trained the body to attack the coronavirus.

The extraordinary tale proved the promise of basic scientific research: that once in a great while, old discoveries can be plucked from obscurity to make history.

An anonymous reader shared this report on "Super-Recognizers" from a series of articles in the Guardian called "Meet the Superhumans." As a child, Yenny Seo often surprised her mother by pointing out a stranger in the grocery store, remarking it was the same person they passed on the street a few weeks earlier. Likewise, when they watched a movie together, Seo would often recognise "extras" who'd appeared fleetingly in other films... A cohort of just 1-2% of the population are "super-recognisers" — people who can memorise and recall unfamiliar faces, even after the briefest glimpse.

The underlying cause is still not entirely clear — it's a new field, with only around 20 scientific papers studying super-recognisers. However, it is suspected genetics plays a role because identical twins show similar performance, and it has been shown that cortical thickness — the amount of neurons — in the part of the brain that supports face recognition is a predictor of superior ability. Because it's such a rare phenomenon, in 2017 Dr. David White, now a lead investigator at the Face Research Lab at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and his colleagues designed a publicly available online screening tool to try to unearth the world's best super-recognisers. Seo, then in her mid-twenties, gave it a go — and her score was so high, White invited her to come to Sydney for more testing.

With more than 100,000 people now tested, Seo still ranks in the top 50....

Over the past decade, security and law enforcement agencies around the world have started recruiting people with superior facial recognition capabilities. London's metropolitan police has a special team who examine CCTV footage from crime scenes — they were used in the investigation into the poisoning of a former Russian spy with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury — and several years ago Queensland police started identifying super-recognisers in its ranks. A proliferation of private agencies has also sprung up, offering the services of super-recognisers.

Seo has no interest....

Long-time Slashdot reader cusco shares a fish story from the Guardian.

Apparently Israeli researchers created a robotic car and taught six fish to navigate it on land... First, the team, led by Prof Ronen Segev, created a watery tank on wheels that moved in response to the movements and orientation of the fish. Then they set about teaching the goldfish (Carassius auratus) how to drive it — much like humans learn to ride a bike or drive a car.

The fish first had to connect their own swimming movements to the movements of the vehicle so they could navigate it. Then they were given a destination: a pink target board in a foreign room that elicited a food reward when the vehicle touched it. A computerised camera system attached to this "fish operated vehicle" recorded and translated the fish's swimming directions.

After several days of training, the fish successfully navigated the vehicle to the target from different starting positions in the room — even if they faced obstacles like false targets or hitting a wall.