The discovery of a huge fossilised skull that was wrapped up and hidden in a Chinese well nearly 90 years ago has forced scientists to rewrite the story of human evolution. Shmoodling writes: Analysis of the remains has revealed a new branch of the human family tree that points to a previously unknown sister group more closely related to modern humans than the Neanderthals. The extraordinary fossil has been named a new human species, Homo longi or "Dragon man," by Chinese researchers, although other experts are more cautious about the designation.

"I think this is one of the most important finds of the past 50 years," said Prof Chris Stringer, research leader at the Natural History Museum in London, who worked on the project. "It's a wonderfully preserved fossil." The skull appears to have a remarkable backstory. According to the researchers, it was originally found in 1933 by Chinese labourers building a bridge over the Songhua River in Harbin, in China's northernmost province, Heilongjiang, during the Japanese occupation. To keep the skull from falling into Japanese hands it was wrapped and hidden in an abandoned well, resurfacing only in 2018 after the man who hid it told his grandson about it shortly before he died. Details are published in three papers in The Innovation.

SpaceX is "shooting for July" to launch the first orbital spaceflight of its Starship rocket, company president Gwynne Shotwell said Friday. From a report: "I'm hoping we make it, but we all know that this is difficult," Shotwell said, speaking at the National Space Society's virtual International Space Development conference. "We are really on the cusp of flying that system, or at least attempting the first orbital flight of that system, really in the very near term," Shotwell added. SpaceX has conducted multiple short test flights of Starship prototypes over the past year, but reaching orbit represents the next step in testing the rocket. The company in May revealed its plan for the flight, which would launch from the company's facility in Texas and aim to splash down off the coast of Hawaii. Starship prototypes stand at about 160 feet tall, or around the size of a 16-story building, and are built of stainless steel -- representing the early version of the rocket that Musk unveiled in 2019. The rocket initially launches on a "Super Heavy" booster, which makes up the bottom half of the rocket and stands about 230 feet tall. Together, Starship and Super Heavy will be nearly 400 feet tall when stacked for the launch.

Hmmmmmm writes: China aims to send its first crewed mission to Mars in 2033, with regular follow-up flights to follow, under a long-term plan to build a permanently inhabited base on the Red Planet and extract its resources. The ambitious plan, which will intensify a race with the United States to plant humans on Mars, was disclosed in detail for the first time after China landed a robotic rover on Mars in mid-May in its inaugural mission to the planet. Crewed launches to Mars are planned for 2033, 2035, 2037, 2041 and beyond, the head of China's main rocket maker, Wang Xiaojun, told a space exploration conference in Russia recently by video link. Before the crewed missions begin, China will send robots to Mars to study possible sites for the base and to build systems to extract resources there, the official China Space News reported on Wednesday, citing Wang, who is head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.

The coronavirus vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna may have caused heart problems in more than 1,200 Americans, including about 500 who were younger than age 30, according to data reported on Wednesday by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Still, the benefits of immunization greatly outweighed the risks, and advisers to the C.D.C. strongly recommended vaccination for all Americans 12 and older. The New York Times: The heart problems reported are myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle; and pericarditis, inflammation of the lining around the heart. The risk is higher after the second dose of an mRNA vaccine than after the first, the researchers reported, and much higher in men than in women. But overall, the side effect is very uncommon -- just 12.6 cases per million second doses administered. The researchers estimated that out of a million second doses given to boys ages 12 to 17, the vaccines might cause a maximum of 70 myocarditis cases, but would prevent 5,700 infections, 215 hospitalizations and two deaths. Agency researchers presented the data to members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations on vaccine use in the United States. (The scientists grouped pericarditis with myocarditis for reporting purposes.) Most cases were mild, with symptoms like fatigue, chest pain and disturbances in heart rhythm that quickly cleared up, the researchers said. Of the 484 cases reported in Americans under age 30, the C.D.C. has definitively linked 323 cases to vaccination. The rest remain under investigation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A large facility capable of extracting significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the air is being planned for north east Scotland. The proposed plant would remove up to one million tonnes of CO2 every year -- the same amount taken up by around 40 million trees. The extracted gas could be stored permanently deep under the seabed off the Scottish coast. This Direct Air Capture (DAC) plan is a joint project between UK firm Storegga and Canadian company Carbon Engineering. It's at a very early stage of development -- today's announcement is the beginning of the engineering and design of the plant. A feasibility study has already been carried out and if everything goes well, the facility would be operational by 2026. Storegga say up to 300 jobs would be created in the construction phase. However there are many hurdles, including planning and finance -- and a site for the plant won't be selected until next year. If it does go ahead it would be the biggest DAC facility in Europe and depending on the final configuration, could be the biggest in the world. Why Scotland? The companies cite the country's skilled workforce needed to operate a DAC facility, given their abundant renewable energy sources. The country also has pipelines going out under the sea to allow the permanent burial of the captured carbon.

An array of tiny fossils suggests dinosaurs not only roamed the Arctic, but hatched and raised their young there too. The Guardian reports: While dinosaur fossils have previously been found in the Arctic, it was unclear whether they lived there year-round or were seasonal visitors. Now experts say hundreds of fossils from very young dinosaurs recovered from northern Alaska indicates the creatures reproduced in the region, suggesting it was their permanent home. Prof Gregory Erickson, a palaeobiologist at Florida State University and a co-author of the research, said the discovery was akin to a prehistoric maternity ward, adding it was very rare to find remains of such young dinosaurs because they are so small and delicate.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, Erickson and colleagues reported how they analysed fossils recovered from the Upper Cretaceous Prince Creek Formation in a series of expeditions spanning a decade and involved the use of fine mesh screens to sift sediments. Though remains from dinosaurs have previously been found in the formation, none showed evidence of reproduction. But the new research has revealed the discovery of tiny teeth and bones from young dinosaurs, including those who were just about to hatch or had recently done so. The fossils, dating to around 70m years ago, came from large and small-bodied dinosaurs covering at least seven different types -- including duck-billed and horned dinosaurs. Teeth were also found from a young tyrannosaur, said Erickson, possibly just six months old.

While the findings rule out the idea that dinosaurs only moved north after reproduction, Erickson added that young hatched in the Arctic would have been too small to travel south for the winter. "Given long incubation periods, small hatching sizes, and the short Arctic summer, it is very unlikely the dinosaurs were migrating," he said. The team said the conclusion that the dinosaurs likely lived in the Arctic year-round is backed up by other evidence, including that many of the species have not been found in rocks of a similar age at lower latitudes. At the time that dinosaurs roamed the Arctic, the region would have lacked big polar ice caps and had conifer forests, but the researchers say the creatures still faced harsh conditions, with up to 120 days of continuous darkness in the winter and an average annual temperature of just above 6C.

The storied space telescope that brought you stunning photos of the solar system and enriched our understanding of the cosmos over the past three decades is experiencing a technical glitch. From a report: Scientists at NASA say the Hubble Space Telescope's payload computer, which operates the spacecraft's scientific instruments, went down suddenly on June 13. Without it, the instruments on board meant to snap pictures and collect data are not currently working. Scientists have run a series of tests on the malfunctioning computer system but have yet to figure out what went wrong. "It's just the inefficiency of trying to fix something which is orbiting 400 miles over your head instead of in your laboratory," Paul Hertz, the director of astrophysics for NASA, told NPR. "If this computer were in the lab, we'd be hooking up monitors and testing the inputs and outputs all over the place, and would be really quick to diagnose it," he said. "All we can do is send a command from our limited set of commands and then see what data comes out of the computer and then send that data down and try to analyze it."

At first NASA scientists wondered if a "degrading memory module" on Hubble was to blame. Then on Tuesday the agency said it was investigating whether the computer's Central Processing Module (CPM) or its Standard Interface (STINT) hardware, which helps the CPM communicate with other components, caused the problem. Hertz said the current assumption, though unverified, was that the technical issue was a "random parts failure" somewhere on the computer system, which was built in the 1980s and launched into space in 1990. "They're very primitive computers compared to what's in your cell phone," he said, "but the problem is we can't touch it or see it." Most of Hubble's components have redundant back-ups, so once scientists figure out the specific component that's causing the computer problem, they can remotely switch over to its back-up part.

UPDATE (7/30): All the missing virus sequences have now been published, with their deletion being explained as just "an editorial oversight by a scientific journal," according to the New York Times.

In Slashdot's original report, an anonymous reader quoted another report from The New York Times: About a year ago, genetic sequences from more than 200 virus samples from early cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan disappeared from an online scientific database. Now, by rooting through files stored on Google Cloud, a researcher in Seattle reports that he has recovered 13 of those original sequences -- intriguing new information for discerning when and how the virus may have spilled over from a bat or another animal into humans. The new analysis, released on Tuesday, bolsters earlier suggestions that a variety of coronaviruses may have been circulating in Wuhan before the initial outbreaks linked to animal and seafood markets in December 2019. As the Biden administration investigates the contested origins of the virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, the study neither strengthens nor discounts the hypothesis that the pathogen leaked out of a famous Wuhan lab. But it does raise questions about why original sequences were deleted, and suggests that there may be more revelations to recover from the far corners of the internet.
UPDATE (6/25): The Washington Post notes the data wasn't exactly suppressed. "Processed forms of the same data were included in a preprint paper from Chinese scientists posted in March 2020 and, after peer review, published that June in the journal Small." And in addition: The NIH released a statement Wednesday saying that a researcher who originally published the genetic sequences asked for them to be removed from the NIH database so that they could be included in a different database. The agency said it is standard practice to remove data if requested to do so...

Bloom's paper acknowledges that there are benign reasons why researchers might want to delete data from a public database. The data cited by Bloom are not alone in being removed by the NIH during the pandemic. The agency, in response to an inquiry from The Post, said the National Library of Medicine has so far identified eight instances since the start of the pandemic when researchers had withdrawn submissions to the library.

"This one from China and the rest from submitters predominantly in the U.S.," the NIH said in its response. "All of those followed standard operating procedures."
The New York Times writes: The genetic sequences of viral samples hold crucial clues about how SARS-CoV-2 shifted to our species from another animal, most likely a bat. Most precious of all are sequences from early in the pandemic, because they take scientists closer to the original spillover event. As [Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who wrote the new report] was reviewing what genetic data had been published by various research groups, he came across a March 2020 study with a spreadsheet that included information on 241 genetic sequences collected by scientists at Wuhan University. The spreadsheet indicated that the scientists had uploaded the sequences to an online database called the Sequence Read Archive, managed by the U.S. government's National Library of Medicine. But when Dr. Bloom looked for the Wuhan sequences in the database earlier this month, his only result was "no item found." Puzzled, he went back to the spreadsheet for any further clues. It indicated that the 241 sequences had been collected by a scientist named Aisi Fu at Renmin Hospital in Wuhan. Searching medical literature, Dr. Bloom eventually found another study posted online in March 2020 by Dr. Fu and colleagues, describing a new experimental test for SARS-CoV-2. The Chinese scientists published it in a scientific journal three months later. In that study, the scientists wrote that they had looked at 45 samples from nasal swabs taken "from outpatients with suspected Covid-19 early in the epidemic." They then searched for a portion of SARS-CoV-2's genetic material in the swabs. The researchers did not publish the actual sequences of the genes they fished out of the samples. Instead, they only published some mutations in the viruses.

But a number of clues indicated to Dr. Bloom that the samples were the source of the 241 missing sequences. The papers included no explanation as to why the sequences had been uploaded to the Sequence Read Archive, only to disappear later. Perusing the archive, Dr. Bloom figured out that many of the sequences were stored as files on Google Cloud. Each sequence was contained in a file in the cloud, and the names of the files all shared the same basic format, he reported. Dr. Bloom swapped in the code for a missing sequence from Wuhan. Suddenly, he had the sequence. All told, he managed to recover 13 sequences from the cloud this way. With this new data, Dr. Bloom looked back once more at the early stages of the pandemic. He combined the 13 sequences with other published sequences of early coronaviruses, hoping to make progress on building the family tree of SARS-CoV-2. Working out all the steps by which SARS-CoV-2 evolved from a bat virus has been a challenge because scientists still have a limited number of samples to study. Some of the earliest samples come from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where an outbreak occurred in December 2019. But those market viruses actually have three extra mutations that are missing from SARS-CoV-2 samples collected weeks later. In other words, those later viruses look more like coronaviruses found in bats, supporting the idea that there was some early lineage of the virus that did not pass through the seafood market. Dr. Bloom found that the deleted sequences he recovered from the cloud also lack those extra mutations. "They're three steps more similar to the bat coronaviruses than the viruses from the Huanan fish market," Dr. Bloom said. This suggests, he said, that by the time SARS-CoV-2 reached the market, it had been circulating for awhile in Wuhan or beyond. The market viruses, he argued, aren't representative of full diversity of coronaviruses already loose in late 2019.
UPDATE (7/30): When republishing their sequences, the researchers indicated they actually came from January 30, 2020 (and not "late 2019").

Scientists have managed to slow down the atoms almost to a complete stop in the largest macro-scale object yet. The research has been published in the journal Science. New Atlas reports: The temperature of a given object is directly tied to the motion of its atoms -- basically, the hotter something is, the more its atoms jiggle around. By extension, there's a point where the object is so cold that its atoms come to a complete standstill, a temperature known as absolute zero (-273.15 C, -459.67 F). Scientists have been able to chill atoms and groups of atoms to a fraction above absolute zero for decades now, inducing what's called the motional ground state. This is a great starting point to then create exotic states of matter, such as supersolids, or fluids that seem to have negative mass. Understandably, it's much harder to do with larger objects, because they're made up of more atoms which are all interacting with their surroundings. But now, a large international team of scientists has broken the record for largest object to be induced into a motional ground state (or extremely closely to one, anyway).

Most of the time, these experiments are done with clouds of millions of atoms, but the new test was performed on a 10-kg (22-lb) object that contains almost an octillion atoms. Strangely enough, that "object" isn't just one thing itself but the combined motion of four different objects, with a mass of 40 kg (88 lb) each. The researchers conducted the experiment at LIGO, a huge facility famous for detecting gravitational waves as they wash over Earth. It does this by beaming lasers down two 4-km (2.5-mile) tunnels, and bouncing them back with mirrors -- and those mirrors were the objects that the new study cooled to a motional ground state. The photons of light in LIGO's lasers exert tiny bumps on the mirrors as they bounce off, and these disturbances can be measured in later photons. Since the beams are constant, the scientists have plenty of data about the motions of the atoms in the mirrors -- meaning they can then design the perfect counteracting forces. To do so, the researchers attached electromagnets to the back of each mirror, which reduced their collective motion almost to the motional ground state. The mirrors moved less than one-thousandth the width of a proton, essentially cooling down to a crisp 77 nanokelvins -- a hair above absolute zero. The team says that this breakthrough could enable new quantum experiments on the macro scale.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Few harbingers of old age are clearer than the sight of gray hair. As we grow older, black, brown, blonde or red strands lose their youthful hue. Although this may seem like a permanent change, new research reveals that the graying process can be undone -- at least temporarily. In a study published today in eLife, a group of researchers provide the most robust evidence of this phenomenon to date in hair from around a dozen people of various ages, ethnicities and sexes. It also aligns patterns of graying and reversal to periods of stress, which implies that this aging-related process is closely associated with our psychological well-being.

The researchers [...] developed a technique to digitize and quantify the subtle changes in color, which they dubbed hair pigmentation patterns, along each strand. These patterns revealed something surprising: In 10 of [the 14 participants], who were between age nine and 39, some graying hairs regained color. The team also found that this occurred not just on the head but in other bodily regions as well. "When we saw this in pubic hair, we thought, 'Okay, this is real,'" [Martin Picard, a mitochondrial psychobiologist at Columbia University] says. "This happens not just in one person or on the head but across the whole body." He adds that because the reversibility only appeared in some hair follicles, however, it is likely limited to specific periods when changes are still able to occur. Most people start noticing their first gray hairs in their 30s -- although some may find them in their late 20s. This period, when graying has just begun, is probably when the process is most reversible, according to [study co-author Ralf Paus, a dermatologist at the University of Miami]. In those with a full head of gray hair, most of the strands have presumably reached a "point of no return," but the possibility remains that some hair follicles may still be malleable to change, he says.

In a small subset of participants, the researchers pinpointed segments in single hairs where color changes occurred in the pigmentation patterns. Then they calculated the times when the change happened using the known average growth rate of human hair: approximately one centimeter per month. These participants also provided a history of the most stressful events they had experienced over the course of a year. This analysis revealed that the times when graying or reversal occurred corresponded to periods of significant stress or relaxation. In one individual, a 35-year-old man with auburn hair, five strands of hair underwent graying reversal during the same time span, which coincided with a two-week vacation. Another subject, a 30-year-old woman with black hair, had one strand that contained a white segment that corresponded to two months during which she underwent marital separation and relocation -- her highest-stress period in the year.

For some time, a collaboration of biologists, chemists and physicists centered at the Universities of Oldenburg (Germany) and Oxford (UK) have been gathering evidence suggesting that the magnetic sense of migratory birds such as European robins is based on a specific light-sensitive protein in the eye. In the current edition of the journal Nature, this team demonstrate that the protein cryptochrome 4, found in birds' retinas, is sensitive to magnetic fields and could well be the long-sought magnetic sensor. Phys.Org reports: First author Jingjing Xu, a doctoral student in Henrik Mouritsen's research group in Oldenburg, took a decisive step toward this success. After extracting the genetic code for the potentially magnetically sensitive cryptochrome 4 in night-migratory European robins, she was able, for the first time, to produce this photoactive molecule in large quantities using bacterial cell cultures. Christiane Timmel's and Stuart Mackenzie's groups in Oxford then used a wide range of magnetic resonance and novel optical spectroscopy techniques to study the protein and demonstrate its pronounced sensitivity to magnetic fields.

The team also deciphered the mechanism by which this sensitivity arises -- another important advance. "Electrons that can move within the molecule after blue-light activation play a crucial role," explains Mouritsen. Proteins like cryptochrome consist of chains of amino acids: robin cryptochrome 4 has 527 of them. Oxford's Peter Hore and Oldenburg physicist Ilia Solov'yov performed quantum mechanical calculations supporting the idea that four of the 527 -- known as tryptophans -- are essential for the magnetic properties of the molecule. According to their calculations, electrons hop from one tryptophan to the next generating so-called radical pairs which are magnetically sensitive. To prove this experimentally, the team from Oldenburg produced slightly modified versions of the robin cryptochrome, in which each of the tryptophans in turn was replaced by a different amino acid to block the movement of electrons. Using these modified proteins, the Oxford chemistry groups were able to demonstrate experimentally that electrons move within the cryptochrome as predicted in the calculations -- and that the generated radical pairs are essential to explain the observed magnetic field effects. Hore says "if we can prove that cryptochrome 4 is the magnetic sensor we will have demonstrated a fundamentally quantum mechanism that makes animals sensitive to environmental stimuli a million times weaker than previously thought possible."

Artificial intelligence is to be used to tackle the most deadly parasitic diseases in the developing world, tech company DeepMind has announced. The BBC reports: The London-based Alphabet-owned lab will work with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDI) to treat Chagas disease and Leishmaniasis. Scientists spend years in laboratories mapping protein structures. But last year, DeepMind's AlphaFold program was able to achieve the same accuracy in a matter of days. Many diseases are linked to the roles of proteins in: catalysing chemical reactions (enzymes); fighting disease (antibodies); and acting as chemical messengers (hormones such as insulin). And knowing the 3D structure of a protein is important in developing treatments for, among others, cancer, dementia and infectious diseases.

Prof Dame Janet Thornton, of the European Bioinformatics Institute, told BBC News: "Most new drugs in recent years have been developed using protein-structural data as one part of the process. "There are, however, many other aspects which need to be taken into account, which, due to lack of data, may not be amenable to AI approaches." But the predictions would be "particularly valuable" for pathogens with unknown protein structures, including some neglected diseases. "Developing new AI approaches for designing such drugs is a new challenge but one to which the new AI techniques can be applied and this holds out great hope for the future," Dame Janet added.

Proof-assistant software handles an abstract concept at the cutting edge of research, revealing a bigger role for software in mathematics. From a report: Mathematicians have long used computers to do numerical calculations or manipulate complex formulas. In some cases, they have proved major results by making computers do massive amounts of repetitive work -- the most famous being a proof in the 1970s that any map can be coloured with just four different colours, and without filling any two adjacent countries with the same colour. But systems known as proof assistants go deeper. The user enters statements into the system to teach it the definition of a mathematical concept -- an object -- based on simpler objects that the machine already knows about.

A statement can also just refer to known objects, and the proof assistant will answer whether the fact is 'obviously' true or false based on its current knowledge. If the answer is not obvious, the user has to enter more details. Proof assistants thus force the user to lay out the logic of their arguments in a rigorous way, and they fill in simpler steps that human mathematicians had consciously or unconsciously skipped. Once researchers have done the hard work of translating a set of mathematical concepts into a proof assistant, the program generates a library of computer code that can be built on by other researchers and used to define higher-level mathematical objects. In this way, proof assistants can help to verify mathematical proofs that would otherwise be time-consuming and difficult, perhaps even practically impossible, for a human to check. Proof assistants have long had their fans, but this is the first time that they had a major role at the cutting edge of a field, says Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London who was part of a collaboration that checked Scholze and Clausen's result. "The big remaining question was: can they handle complex mathematics?" says Buzzard. "We showed that they can."

Morgan Stanley plans to ban workers from its New York headquarters if they have not received a Covid-19 vaccine. The rule will apply to non-vaccinated guests and clients as well. From a report: According to a source close to the company, Morgan Stanley said in a memo to its employees in the New York metropolitan area that all staff working in buildings with a "large employee presence" are required to confirm their vaccination status by July 1. The source added that "vaccine attestation is on an honorary basis for employees, contingent workforce, clients and visitors." The company plans to expand the vaccination mandate to employees and guests in other Morgan Stanley locations in New York City and nearby Westchester starting July 12. "Operating within a fully vaccinated environment allows us to lift restrictions like the use of face coverings and the need to maintain physical distancing, returning to more normal office conditions," the source added.

For billions of years, Earth has been playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. New research published today in Nature posits that roughly 1,700 stars are in the right position to have spotted life on Earth as early as 5,000 years ago. From a report: These stars, within 100 parsecs (or about 326 light-years) of the sun, were found using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the European Space Agency's Gaia mission. And with thousands of exoplanets already found orbiting other stars in our universe, could we have already seen life on other planets come and go? Might they have seen us? "The universe is dynamic," says Lisa Kaltenegger, director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, and lead author of the study. "Stars move, we move. First the Earth moves around the sun, but the sun moves around the center of our galaxy."

About 70% of exoplanets are found using the transit method: when a planet passes between a star and an observer, the star dims enough to confirm the presence of a previously unseen celestial body. Kaltenegger and coauthor Jackie Faherty of the American Museum of Natural History compiled a list of stars that either will see or already have seen Earth transit in their lifetimes. Of these, they found seven stars with orbiting exoplanets that could potentially be habitable. Statistically, one out of four stars has a planet that exists in the "Goldilocks zone" -- not too hot, not too cold, and just far away from a star to support life. But how do we determine whether faraway exoplanets meet these criteria? When transiting exoplanets block stellar light, part of that light filters through the atmosphere. Energy and light interact with the molecules and atoms of that planet, and by the time that light reaches an astronomer's telescope, scientists can determine whether it has interacted with chemicals like oxygen or methane. A combination of those two, Kaltenegger says, is the fingerprint for life.

Epic Systems' algorithm for identifying signs of sepsis, an often deadly complication from infections that can lead to organ failure, doesn't work as well as advertised, according to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The Verge reports: Epic says its alert system can correctly differentiate patients who do and don't have sepsis 76 percent of the time. The new study found it was only right 63 percent of the time. An Epic spokesperson disputed the findings in a statement to Stat News, saying that other research showed the algorithm was accurate. Sepsis is hard to spot early, but starting treatment as soon as possible can improve patients' chances of survival. The Epic system, and other automated warning tools like it, scan patient test results for signals that someone could be developing the condition. Around a quarter of US hospitals use Epic's electronic medical records, and hundreds of hospitals use its sepsis prediction tool, including the health center at the University of Michigan, where study author Karandeep Singh is an assistant professor.

The study examined data from nearly 40,000 hospitalizations at Michigan Medicine in 2018 and 2019. Patients developed sepsis in 2,552 of those hospitalizations. Epic's sepsis tool missed 1,709 of those cases, around two-thirds of which were still identified and treated quickly. It only identified 7 percent of sepsis cases that were missed by a physician. The analysis also found a high rate of false positives: when an alert went off for a patient, there was only a 12 percent chance that the patient actually would develop sepsis. Part of the problem, Singh told Stat News, seemed to be in the way the Epic algorithm was developed. It defined sepsis based on when a doctor would submit a bill for treatment, not necessarily when a patient first developed symptoms. That means it's catching cases where the doctor already thinks there's an issue. "It's essentially trying to predict what physicians are already doing," Singh said. It's also not the measure of sepsis that researchers would ordinarily use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, the University of Naples Federico II, the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences has found that making food from air would be far more efficient than growing crops. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their analysis and comparison of the efficiency of growing crops (soybeans) and using a food-from-air technique. [...] To make their comparisons, the researchers used a food-from-air system that uses solar energy panels to make electricity, which is combined with carbon dioxide from the air to produce food for microbes grown in a bioreactor. The protein the microbes produce is then treated to remove nucleic acids and then dried to produce a powder suitable for consumption by humans and animals.

They compared the efficiency of the system with a 10-square-kilometer soybean field. Their analysis showed that growing food from air was 10 times as efficient as growing soybeans in the ground. Put another way, they suggested that a 10-square-kilometer piece of land in the Amazon used to grow soybeans could be converted to a one-square-kilometer piece of land for growing food from the air, with the other nine square kilometers turned back to wild forest growth. They also note that the protein produced using the food-from-air approach had twice the caloric value as most other crops such as corn, wheat and rice.

After six months of check-out and calibration in orbit, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite will make its first two data streams available to the public on June 22. It launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Nov. 21, 2020, and is a U.S.-European collaboration to measure sea surface height and other key ocean features, such as ocean surface wind speed and wave height. Phys.Org reports: One of the sea surface height data streams that will be released is accurate to 2.3 inches (5.8 centimeters) and will be available within hours of when the instruments aboard Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich collect it. A second stream of data, accurate to 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters), will be released two days after collection. The difference in when the products become available balances accuracy with delivery timeliness for tasks like forecasting the weather and helping to monitor the formation of hurricanes. More datasets, which will be accurate to about 1.2 inches (2.9 centimeters), are slated for distribution later this year and are intended for research activities and climate science including tracking global mean sea level rise.

The satellite, named after former NASA Earth Science Division Director Michael Freilich, collects its measurements for about 90% of the world's oceans. It is one of two satellites that compose the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission. The second satellite, Sentinel-6B, is slated for launch in 2025. Together, they are the latest in a series of spacecraft starting with TOPEX/Poseidon in 1992 and continuing with the Jason series of satellites that have been gathering precise ocean height measurements for nearly 30 years. Shortly after launch, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich moved into position, trailing the current reference sea level satellite Jason-3 by 30 seconds. Scientists and engineers then spent time cross-calibrating the data collected by both satellites to ensure the continuity of measurements between the two. Once they have are assured of the data quality, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich will then become the primary sea level satellite.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: From espresso to instant, coffee is part of the daily routine for millions. Now research suggests the brew could be linked to a lower chance of developing or dying from chronic liver disease. Chronic liver disease is a major health problem around the world. According to the British Liver Trust, liver disease is the third leading cause of premature death in the UK, with deaths having risen 400% since 1970. Writing in the journal BMC Public Health, Roderick and colleagues report how they analyzed data from 494,585 participants in the UK Biobank -- a project designed to help unpick the genetic and environmental factors associated with particular conditions. All participants were aged 40 to 69 when they signed up to the project, with 384,818 saying they were coffee drinkers at the outset compared with 109,767 who did not consume the beverage.

The team looked at the liver health of the participants over a median period of almost 11 years, finding 3,600 cases of chronic liver disease, with 301 deaths, and 1,839 cases of simple fatty liver disease. The analysis revealed that after taking into account factors such as body mass index, alcohol consumption, and smoking status, those who drank any amount of coffee, and of any sort, had a 20% lower risk of developing chronic liver disease or fatty liver disease (taken together) than those who did not consume the brew. The coffee drinkers also had a 49% lower risk of dying from chronic liver disease. The team said the magnitude of the effect increased with the amount of coffee consumed, up to about three to four cups a day, "beyond which further increases in consumption provided no additional benefit." A reduction in risk was also found when instant, decaffeinated and ground coffee were considered separately -- although the latter linked to the largest effect.

Venus might be hell, but don't call it a dead planet. Amid surface temperatures of up to 471C and surface pressures 100 times greater than those on Earth, new research suggests the planet might still be geologically active. That's encouraging news to people who think it could once have hosted life (or that it might still be able to). From a report: Earth's lithosphere (its crust and upper mantle) is made of "plates" that move around and crash into each other, resulting in mountains, deep ocean trenches, and volcanic and seismic activity. This tectonic activity also plays an important role in the carbon cycle, the processes in which carbon is released and reabsorbed in the ecosystem; by regulating the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it has helped keep the planet cool and comfortable this whole time. Thus far, scientists have never observed anything similar on Venus. But we've never been able to rule it out, because it's hard to make scientific observations of the planet (its thick clouds obscure its surface, and any spacecraft we'd land there would most likely melt in a matter of hours). In the new findings, published in PNAS, scientists think they've finally spotted evidence of a new type of tectonic activity on Venus.

The team used observations made by the Magellan probe, which orbited Venus from 1990 to 1994 and mapped the surface using radar. The features it spotted have been analyzed before, but the new study uses a new computer model that can recognize surface deformations indicating large block structures in the lithosphere. These blocks, each about the size of Alaska, seem to have been sluggishly jostling against each other like broken pack ice on a pond or lake. This is quite different from the current type of plate tectonics on Earth. But if confirmed, it would nonetheless be evidence of heat currents and molten material in Venus's interior -- something that's never before been observed. The authors think parallels with Earth's geology during the Archean Eon (2.5 to 4 billion years ago) suggest that the "pack ice" patterns could be a transition from an earlier period of plate tectonics on Venus when the planet was more Earth-like.