Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic. Nature: According to Trish Greenhalgh, a primary-care health researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, the IPC GDG members were guided by their medical training and the dominant thinking in the medical field about how infectious respiratory diseases spread; this turned out to be flawed in the case of SARS-CoV-2 and could be inaccurate for other viruses as well. These biases led the group to discount relevant information -- from laboratory-based aerosol studies and outbreak reports, for instance. So the IPC GDG concluded that airborne transmission was rare or unlikely outside a small set of aerosol-generating medical procedures, such as inserting a breathing tube into a patient.

That viewpoint is clear in a commentary by members of the IPC GDG, including Schwaber, Sobsey and Fisher, published in August 20202. The authors dismissed research using air-flow modelling, case reports describing possible airborne transmission and summaries of evidence for airborne transmission, labelling such reports "opinion pieces." Instead, they concluded that "SARS-CoV-2 is not spread by the airborne route to any significant extent." In effect, the group failed to look at the whole picture that was emerging, says Greenhalgh. "You've got to explain all the data, not just the data that you've picked to support your view," and the airborne hypothesis is the best fit for all the data available, she says. One example she cites is the propensity for the virus to transmit in 'superspreader events,' in which numerous individuals are infected at a single gathering, often by a single person. "Nothing explains some of these superspreader events except aerosol spread," says Greenhalgh.

Throughout 2020, there was also mounting evidence that indoor spaces posed a much greater risk of infection than outdoor environments did. An analysis of reported outbreaks recorded up to the middle of August 2020 revealed that people were more than 18 times as likely to be infected indoors as outdoors3. If heavy droplets or dirty hands had been the main vehicles for transmitting the virus, such a strong discrepancy would not have been observed. Although the WHO played down the risk of airborne transmission, it did invite Li [a building environment engineer at the University of Hong Kong who suspected early on that SARS-CoV-2 was also airborne] to become a member of the IPC GDG after he spoke to the group in mid-2020. Had the organization not at least been open to his view that infections were caused by aerosols, especially at short range, "they would not have invited me there as they knew my standing," he says.

People could eventually be able to turn the clock back on the cell-ageing process by 30 years, according to researchers who have developed a technique for reprogramming skin cells to behave as if they are much younger. From a report: Research from the Babraham Institute, a life sciences research organisation in Cambridge, could lead to the development of techniques that will stave off the diseases of old age by restoring the function of older cells and reducing their biological age. In experiments simulating a skin wound, older cells were exposed to a concoction of chemicals that "reprogrammed" them to behave more like youthful cells and removed age-related changes.

This has been previously achieved, but the new work was completed in a much a shorter time frame -- 13 days compared with 50 -- and made the cells even younger. Dr Diljeet Gill, a researcher at the Babraham Institute, said: "Our understanding of ageing on a molecular level has progressed over the last decade, giving rise to techniques that allow researchers to measure age-related biological changes in human cells. We were able to apply this to our experiment to determine the extent of reprogramming our new method achieved. Our results represent a big step forward in our understanding of cell reprogramming."

Across three different animal models researchers have demonstrated how short bursts of ultrasound targeted at specific clusters of nerves in the liver can effectively lower insulin and glucose levels. New Atlas reports: Reporting in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by GE Research, including investigators from the Yale School of Medicine, UCLA, and the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, demonstrated a unique non-invasive ultrasound method designed to stimulate specific sensory nerves in the liver. The technology is called peripheral focused ultrasound stimulation (pFUS) and it allows highly targeted ultrasound pulses to be directed at specific tissue containing nerve endings. "We used this technique to explore stimulation of an area of the liver called the porta hepatis," the researchers explained in a Nature briefing. "This region contains the hepatoportal nerve plexus, which communicates information on glucose and nutrient status to the brain but has been difficult to study as its nerve structures are too small to separately stimulate with implanted electrodes."

The newly published study indicates short targeted bursts of pFUS at this area of the liver successfully reversed the onset of hyperglycaemia. The treatment was found to be effective in three separate animal models of diabetes: mice, rats and pigs. [...] The study found just three minutes of focused ultrasound each day was enough to maintain normal blood glucose levels in the diabetic animals. Studies in humans are currently underway to work out whether this method translates from animal studies. But there are other hurdles facing broad clinical deployment of the technique beyond simply proving it works. Current ultrasound tools used to perform this kind of pFUS technique require trained technicians. The researchers suggest the technology exists to simplify and automate these systems in a way that could be used by patients at home, but it will need to be developed before this treatment can be widely deployed.

Loren Grush writes via The Verge: Tomorrow morning, SpaceX is set to launch yet another crew of four to the International Space Station from Florida -- but unlike most of the company's passenger flights, this new crop of flyers won't include any current NASA astronauts. All four members of the crew are civilians, flying with a commercial aerospace company called Axiom Space. Their flight will mark the first time a completely private crew has visited the ISS. It's a new type of human spaceflight mission and one that comes with a hefty price tag for its participants. Three of the four flyers have each paid a reported $55 million for their seats on SpaceX's crew capsule, called the Crew Dragon. The trio of novice spacefarers includes Canadian investor Mark Pathy, American real estate investor Larry Connor, and former Israeli Air Force pilot Eytan Stibbe. The commander of the trip is a spaceflight veteran: Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who has flown four missions to space and now serves as a vice president of Axiom.

Their mission, called Ax-1, is the latest in an emerging trend of completely private astronaut flights to orbit. [...] Axiom -- which strives to create a fleet of commercial space stations -- has arranged for three additional private crew missions to the ISS, just like Ax-1, to gear up for the creation of its first station. The company's goal is to "make space more accessible to everyone." "This really does represent the first step where a bunch of individuals who want to do something meaningful in low Earth orbit -- that aren't members of a government -- are able to take this opportunity," Mike Suffredini, Axiom's CEO and the former program manager of the ISS at NASA, said during a press conference. Though, until costs come down, such individuals will need a fat wallet.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed in a newly-released memo. The meteor ignited in a fireball in the skies near Papua New Guinea, the memo states, and scientists believe it possibly sprinkled interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean. The confirmation backs up the breakthrough discovery of the first interstellar meteor -- and, retroactively, the first known interstellar object of any kind to reach our solar system -- which was initially flagged by a pair of Harvard University researchers in a study posted on the preprint server arXiv in 2019.

Amir Siraj, a student pursuing astrophysics at Harvard who led the research, said the study has been awaiting peer review and publication for years, but has been hamstrung by the odd circumstances that arose from the sheer novelty of the find and roadblocks put up by the involvement of information classified by the U.S. government. The discovery of the meteor, which measured just a few feet wide, follows recent detections of two other interstellar objects in our solar system, known as 'Oumuamua and Comet Borisov, that were much larger and did not come into close contact with Earth.

"I get a kick out of just thinking about the fact that we have interstellar material that was delivered to Earth, and we know where it is," said Siraj, who is Director of Interstellar Object Studies at Harvard's Galileo Project, in a call. "One thing that I'm going to be checking -- and I'm already talking to people about -- is whether it is possible to search the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea and see if we can get any fragments." Siraj acknowledged that the odds of such a find are low, because any remnants of the exploded fireball probably landed in tiny amounts across a disparate region of the ocean, making it tricky to track them down. "It would be a big undertaking, but we're going to look at it in extreme depth because the possibility of getting the first piece of interstellar material is exciting enough to check this very thoroughly and talk to all the world experts on ocean expeditions to recover meteorites," he noted. "Siraj called the multi-year process a 'whole saga' as they navigated a bureaucratic labyrinth that wound its way though Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA, and other governmental arms, before ultimately landing at the desk of Joel Mozer, Chief Scientist of Space Operations Command at the U.S. Space Force service component of USSC," adds Motherboard.

Mozer confirmed that the object indicated "an interstellar trajectory," which was first brought to Siraj's attention last week via a tweet from a NASA scientist. He's now "renewing the effort to get the original discovery published so that the scientific community can follow-up with more targeted research into the implications of the find," the report says.

Despite the availability of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, so many people died in the second year of the pandemic in the U.S. that the nation's life expectancy dropped for a second year in a row last year, according to a new analysis. NPR reports: The analysis of provisional government statistics found U.S. life expectancy fell by just under a half a year in 2021, adding to a dramatic plummet in life expectancy that occurred in 2020. Public health experts had hoped the vaccines would prevent another drop the following year. "The finding that instead we had a horrible loss of life in 2021 that actually drove the life expectancy even lower than it was in 2020 is very disturbing," says Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of population health and health equity at Virginia Commonwealth University, who help conduct the analysis. "It speaks to an extensive loss of life during 2021."

Many of the deaths occurred in people in the prime of their lives, Woolf says, and drove the overall U.S. life expectancy to fall to 76.6 years -- the lowest in at least 25 years. "The motivation for this study was to determine whether the horrible drop in life expectancy that we documented in 2020 resolved or rebounded in 2021 or whether there was a continued decline. Unfortunately, we did not find good news," Woolf told NPR in an interview.

After 10 years of careful analysis and scrutiny, scientists of the CDF collaboration at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today that they have achieved the most precise measurement to date of the mass of the W boson, one of nature's force-carrying particles. Phys.Org reports: Using data collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab, or CDF, scientists have now determined the particle's mass with a precision of 0.01% -- twice as precise as the previous best measurement. It corresponds to measuring the weight of an 800-pound gorilla to 1.5 ounces. The new precision measurement, published in the journal Science, allows scientists to test the standard model of particle physics, the theoretical framework that describes nature at its most fundamental level. The result: The new mass value shows tension with the value scientists obtain using experimental and theoretical inputs in the context of the standard model. If confirmed, this measurement suggests the potential need for improvements to the standard model calculation or extensions to the model.

A British startup pioneering a new approach to fusion energy has successfully combined atomic nuclei, in what the UK regulator described as an important step in the decades-long effort to generate electricity from the reaction that powers the sun. From a report: Oxford-based First Light Fusion, which has been developing an approach called projectile fusion since 2011, said it had produced energy in the form of neutrons by forcing deuterium isotopes to fuse, validating years of research. While other fusion experiments have generated more power for longer, either by using "tokamak" machines or high-powered lasers, First Light says its approach, which involves firing a projectile at a target containing the fuel, could offer a faster route to commercial fusion power. "The value of this [result] is that it offers potentially a much cheaper, a much easier path to power production," said chief executive Nicholas Hawker.

To achieve fusion, First Light used a hyper-velocity gas gun to launch a projectile at a speed of 6.5km per second -- about 10 times faster than a rifle bullet -- at a tiny target designed to amplify the energy of the impact and force the deuterium fuel to fuse. The design of the target -- a clear cube, a little over a centimetre wide, enclosing two spherical fuel capsules -- is the key technology and is closely guarded by the company. "It is the ultimate espresso capsule," Hawker told the Financial Times last year. First Light, which is backed by China's Tencent, hopes to manufacture and sell the targets to future power plants -- built to its design -- which would need to vaporise one every 30 seconds to generate continual power. Further reading: So How Close Are We Now to Nuclear Fusion Energy? (August 2021).

An anonymous reader shares a report: Bad news for everyone who loved watching Bill Nye the Science Guy during middle school science class: your fave is problematic. This week, Coca-Cola, one of the world's biggest plastic polluters, teamed up with TV's favorite scientist for a campaign to create a "world without waste," a joke of a corporate greenwashing campaign. In a video innocuously titled "The Coca-Cola Company and Bill Nye Demystify Recycling," an animated version of Nye -- with a head made out of a plastic bottle and his signature bow tie fashioned from a Coke label -- walks viewers through the ways "the good people at the Coca-Cola company are dedicating themselves to addressing our global plastic waste problem." Coke, Nye explains, wants to use predominantly recycled materials to create bottles for its beverages; he then describes the process of recycling a plastic bottle, from a user throwing it into a recycling bin to being sorted and shredded into new material.

"If we can recover and recycle plastic, we can not only keep it from becoming trash, but we can use that plastic again and again -- it's an amazing material," quips Shill Nye the Plastic Guy. "What's more, when we use recycled material, we also reduce our carbon footprint. What's not to love?" What's not, indeed! The video is, on the surface, an accurate depiction of the process of recycling a beverage bottle. The problem lies in what recycling can actually do. Nye paints a rosy picture in the video of plastic Coke bottles being recycled "again and again" -- but if everything worked like he's said, we wouldn't be facing plastic pollution that has grown fourfold over the past few decades. Thanks to concerted lobbying efforts, the public has been led to believe that recycling is the cure for our disastrous plastic addiction. What it does in actuality is place the burden of responsibility on the consumer and allow companies like Coca-Cola to get away with no repercussions for their waste.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Buried in forest litter or sprouting from trees, fungi might give the impression of being silent and relatively self-contained organisms, but a new study suggests they may be champignon communicators. Mathematical analysis of the electrical signals fungi seemingly send to one another has identified patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech. Previous research has suggested that fungi conduct electrical impulses through long, underground filamentous structures called hyphae -- similar to how nerve cells transmit information in humans. It has even shown that the firing rate of these impulses increases when the hyphae of wood-digesting fungi come into contact with wooden blocks, raising the possibility that fungi use this electrical "language" to share information about food or injury with distant parts of themselves, or with hyphae-connected partners such as trees. But do these trains of electrical activity have anything in common with human language?

To investigate, Prof Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England's unconventional computing laboratory in Bristol analyzed the patterns of electrical spikes generated by four species of fungi -- enoki, split gill, ghost and caterpillar fungi. He did this by inserting tiny microelectrodes into substrates colonized by their patchwork of hyphae threads, their mycelia. The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that these spikes often clustered into trains of activity, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words, and that the distribution of these "fungal word lengths" closely matched those of human languages.

Split gills -- which grow on decaying wood, and whose fruiting bodies resemble undulating waves of tightly packed coral -- generated the most complex "sentences" of all. The most likely reasons for these waves of electrical activity are to maintain the fungi's integrity -- analogous to wolves howling to maintain the integrity of the pack -- or to report newly discovered sources of attractants and repellants to other parts of their mycelia, Adamatzky suggested. "There is also another option -- they are saying nothing," he said. "Propagating mycelium tips are electrically charged, and, therefore, when the charged tips pass in a pair of differential electrodes, a spike in the potential difference is recorded." Whatever these "spiking events" represent, they do not appear to be random, he added.

schwit1 shares a report from SpaceNews: In the largest commercial launch deal ever, Amazon is purchasing up to 83 launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance to deploy most of its 3,236-satellite Project Kuiper broadband megaconstellation, contracts worth several billion dollars. Amazon announced April 5 the agreements to launch an unspecified number of satellites on Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur rockets over five years. The launches are in addition to nine Atlas 5 launches it purchased from ULA a year ago. Amazon did not disclose financial terms but said it is spending billions of dollars on these contracts as part of the constellation's $10 billion overall cost.

Amazon is buying 38 Vulcan launches from ULA. The agreement includes additional investments in launch infrastructure to support a higher flight rate, such as a dedicated launch platform for Vulcan launches of Kuiper satellites. ULA will make its own investments to support processing two launch vehicles in parallel. "With a total of 47 launches between our Atlas and Vulcan vehicles, we are proud to launch the majority of this important constellation," Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, said in a company statement. "Amazon's investments in launch infrastructure and capability upgrades will benefit both commercial and government customers." The Arianespace deal includes 18 Ariane 6 launches, a contract that Stephane Israel, chief executive of Arianespace, described in a statement as the largest contract in his company's history. Blue Origin is selling 12 New Glenn launches with an option for 15 more. Notably absent is SpaceX, which in addition to its Falcon and Future Starship vehicles is developing its Starlink broadband constellation that will compete with Kuiper.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Scientists have developed a blood test that can predict whether someone is at high risk of a heart attack, stroke, heart failure or dying from one of these conditions within the next four years. The test, which relies of measurements of proteins in the blood, has roughly twice the accuracy of existing risk scores. It could enable doctors to determine whether patients' existing medications are working or whether they need additional drugs to reduce their risk. It could also be used to hasten the development of new cardiovascular drugs by providing a faster means of assessing whether drug candidates are working during clinical trials. The test is already being used in four healthcare systems within the US and [...] it could be introduced to the UK in the near future.

[Researchers] used machine learning to analyze 5,000 proteins in blood plasma samples from 22,849 people and identify a signature of 27 proteins that could predict the four-year likelihood of heart attack, stroke, heart failure or death. When validated in 11,609 individuals, they found their model was roughly twice as good as existing risk scores, which use a person's age, sex, race, medical history, cholesterol and blood pressure to assess their likelihood of having a cardiovascular event. The results were published in Science Translational Medicine. Importantly, the test can also accurately assess risk in people who have previously had a heart attack or stroke, or have additional illnesses, and are taking drugs to reduce their risk, which is where existing risk prediction scores tend to fall down.

Microplastic pollution has been discovered lodged deep in the lungs of living people for the first time. The particles were found in almost all the samples analysed. From a report: The scientists said microplastic pollution was now ubiquitous across the planet, making human exposure unavoidable and meaning "there is an increasing concern regarding the hazards" to health. Samples were taken from tissue removed from 13 patients undergoing surgery and microplastics were found in 11 cases. The most common particles were polypropylene, used in plastic packaging and pipes, and PET, used in bottles. Two previous studies had found microplastics at similarly high rates in lung tissue taken during autopsies.

People were already known to breathe in the tiny particles, as well as consuming them via food and water. Workers exposed to high levels of microplastics are also known to have developed disease. Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time in March, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.

Mumbai's city administration reported India's first case of the highly-transmissible coronavirus variant, XE, on Wednesday. From a report: The hybrid of two omicron strains BA.1 and BA.2 was detected in a 50-year-old woman who had traveled to the city from South Africa in February, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation said in a statement. The asymptomatic patient had no cormorbidities and had been quarantined after being diagnosed almost a month later in March, the BMC said. The hybrid strain, which was first detected in the U.K., could be the most transmissible variant yet, according to the World Health Organization.

Olive is the buzzy startup whose purple "go save health care" buses dominate industry conferences. But its promises to save health systems millions of dollars with its automation software don't deliver. Axios reports: An Axios investigation finds that Olive relies on rough estimations for its calculations, inflates its capabilities and, in many cases, generates only a fraction of the savings it pledges. Erin's reporting includes interviews with 16 people, including former and current employees and health tech executives.

Valued at $4 billion by firms like Tiger Global and Vista Equity Partners, Olive is the highest-profile startup in health care automation; a holy grail that promises to cut costs and direct more time toward patient care. In just 10 years, Olive's promise to reduce its clients' administrative spending by roughly 5X the cost of installing the software has garnered the attention of some of the largest health systems in the U.S. Axios' reporting, which includes interviews with 16 people -- including former and current employees, health tech executives and others -- finds Olive is failing to deliver on those promises.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: What seems like a win-win for a pair of pressing environmental problems describes a Rice University lab's newly discovered chemical technique to turn waste plastic into an effective carbon dioxide (CO2) sorbent for industry. Rice chemist James Tour and co-lead authors Rice alumnus Wala Algozeeb, graduate student Paul Savas and postdoctoral researcher Zhe Yuan reported in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano that heating plastic waste in the presence of potassium acetate produced particles with nanometer-scale pores that trap carbon dioxide molecules. These particles can be used to remove CO2 from flue gas streams, they reported.

"Point sources of CO2 emissions like power plant exhaust stacks can be fitted with this waste-plastic-derived material to remove enormous amounts of CO2 that would normally fill the atmosphere," Tour said. "It is a great way to have one problem, plastic waste, address another problem, CO2 emissions." A current process to pyrolyze plastic known as chemical recycling produces oils, gases and waxes, but the carbon byproduct is nearly useless, he said. However, pyrolyzing plastic in the presence of potassium acetate produces porous particles able to hold up to 18% of their own weight in CO2 at room temperature. In addition, while typical chemical recycling doesn't work for polymer wastes with low fixed carbon content in order to generate CO2 sorbent, including polypropylene and high- and low-density polyethylene, the main constituents in municipal waste, those plastics work especially well for capturing CO2 when treated with potassium acetate.

The lab estimates the cost of carbon dioxide capture from a point source like post-combustion flue gas would be $21 a ton, far less expensive than the energy-intensive, amine-based process in common use to pull carbon dioxide from natural gas feeds, which costs $80-$160 a ton. Like amine-based materials, the sorbent can be reused. Heating it to about 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit) releases trapped carbon dioxide from the pores, regenerating about 90% of the material's binding sites. Because it cycles at 75 degrees Celsius, polyvinyl chloride vessels are sufficient to replace the expensive metal vessels that are normally required. The researchers noted the sorbent is expected to have a longer lifetime than liquid amines, cutting downtime due to corrosion and sludge formation.

Mortality risk was reduced by 50% for older adults who increased their daily steps from around 3,000 to around 7,000, according to new medical research. Axios reports: 7,000 is the new 10,000, in terms of steps you should shoot for, The Lancet medical journal reports. This is all it takes for those 60 and older to dramatically increase their lifespans. Even for younger adults, the benefits of daily walking actually level off around 9,000 steps per day, not 10,000, the researchers found. The risk reduction plateaued beyond that number.

"Walking benefits nearly every cell in the body," says Amanda Paluch, a kinesiologist and public health expert at UMass Amherst and the lead author of the study. It's wildly effective. Walking strengthens your heart, improves bone density, relaxes your mind, and helps with muscle-building and pain management. Almost everyone can do it anywhere: your house, the office, outside. Start with 30 minutes and work your way up."It's not an all or nothing situation," says Paluch. Even just boosting daily step count to 5,000 -- for 60 and older -- and 7,000 -- for younger folks -- slashed mortality risk by 40%.

The plot was worthy of a Dan Brown thriller -- two Charles Darwin manuscripts worth millions of pounds reported as stolen from Cambridge University library after being missing for two decades. From a report: The disappearance prompted a worldwide appeal with the help of the local police force and Interpol. Now, in a peculiar twist, the notebooks -- one of which contains Darwin's seminal 1837 Tree of Life Sketch -- have been anonymously returned in a pink gift bag, with a typed note on an envelope wishing a happy Easter to the librarian. The bag was left on the floor of a public area of the library outside the librarian's office on the fourth floor of the 17-storey building on 9 March, in an area not covered by CCTV. Who left them and where they had been remains a mystery. Dr Jessica Gardner, who became director of library services in 2017 and who reported the notebooks as stolen to police, described her joy at their return as "immense."

"My sense of relief at the notebooks' safe return is profound and almost impossible to adequately express," she said. "I, along with so many others, all across the world, was heartbroken to learn of their loss. The notebooks can now retake their rightful place alongside the rest of the Darwin archive at Cambridge, at the heart of the nation's cultural and scientific heritage, alongside the archives of Sir Isaac Newton and Prof Stephen Hawking."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Astronomers say they have witnessed a planet being born from a disk of gas and dust swirling around a young star. Such claims have been made before, but the team comes to an even more controversial conclusion: that this planet is forming from gas that is collapsing under its own gravity, a mechanism known as gravitational or disk instability. That stands in contrast to a more widely accepted theory of planet formation, in which dust and rocks stick together, slowly building up a planetary core with enough gravity to pull in gas from the disk. If true, the planetary system would be the strongest evidence to date for disk instability. "This system stands alone right now," says team leader Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

That conclusion is already dividing theorists. "This system certainly looks like it's [undergoing] disk instability," says Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a longtime advocate of the theory. But Anders Johansen, a theorist at the University of Copenhagen who helped develop the rival theory of core accretion, is not convinced. "This could be either mechanism," he says. Although more than 5000 exoplanets have been discovered, only a few tens have been imaged directly, and none in the act of being born. Currie and colleagues were intrigued by the nearby star AB Aurigae because it was young -- somewhere between 1 million and 4 million years old -- and because its disk contains kinked, spiral features that could indicate protoplanets. But showing that some of the light from its disk was from a glowing-hot new planet rather than reflected starlight was no easy task. "We sat on this result for 5 years," Currie says. "I did not believe it was a planet until fairly recently." The team published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The largest genetic study of Alzheimer's to date has provided compelling evidence linking the disease to disruption in the brain's immune system. The study, using the genomes of 100,000 people with Alzheimer's and 600,000 healthy people, identified 75 genes linked to an increased risk of the disease, including 42 that had not previously been implicated. The findings suggest degeneration in the brains of dementia patients could be spurred on by "over-aggressive" activity in the brain's immune cells, called microglia.

The study, the largest of its kind to date, also allowed scientists to devise a genetic risk score that could predict which patients with cognitive impairment would, within three years of first showing symptoms, go on to develop Alzheimer's. The score is not intended for clinical use at the moment, but could be used when recruiting people for clinical trials of drugs aimed at treating the disease in the earliest stages. The latest work highlights different sets of genes seen in more common forms of Alzheimer's, including a role for the immune system. "If [at the outset] we'd seen the genetics of common disease, we would've said this is an immune disease," said professor Julie Williams, the director of the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University and a co-author of the study. "It's not the same disease."

Risk genes highlighted in the study include ones that affect how efficiently the brain's immune cells, microglia, clear away tissue that is distressed. In people at risk, these housekeeper cells appeared to be working too aggressively. A similar pattern was found for genes that control how readily synapses, which connect neurons, send out an "eat me" signal when in distress. The high-risk variants appeared to lower the threshold for synapses sending out distress signals, causing the brain to purge connections at a quicker rate. The findings, published in the journal Nature Genetics, fit with previous results pointing to a role for the immune system. People with diabetes, which affects the immune system, are at considerably higher risk, for instance, and once dementia has been diagnosed infections can trigger more rapid cognitive decline.