NASA's long-awaited and high-powered James Webb Space Telescope won't begin observations this year after NASA and its counterpart the European Space Agency (ESA) announced another launch delay. From a report: In coordinated statements, the two agencies announced that the observatory is now targeting a launch on Dec. 18, more than six weeks after its previously set liftoff date. The highly-anticipated project has racked up consistently escalating budget and schedule overruns since development began in the 1990s. "We now know the day that thousands of people have been working towards for many years, and that millions around the world are looking forward to," Gunther Hasinger, ESA's director of science, said in an agency statement. "Webb and its Ariane 5 launch vehicle are ready, thanks to the excellent work across all mission partners. We are looking forward to seeing the final preparations for launch at Europe's Spaceport."

A robot called CIMON-2 (short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) has received a software update that will enable it to perform more complex tasks with a new human crewmate later this year. Space.com reports: The cute floating sphere with a cartoon-like face has been stored at the space station since the departure of the European Space Agency's (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano in February 2020. The robot will wake up again during the upcoming mission of German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who will arrive at the orbital outpost with the SpaceX Crew-3 Dragon mission in October. In the year and a half since the end of the last mission, engineers have worked on improving CIMON's connection to Earth so that it could provide a more seamless service to the astronauts, CIMON project manager Till Eisenberg at Airbus, which developed the intelligent robot together with the German Aerospace Centre DLR and the LMU University in Munich, told Space.com.

"The sphere is just the front end," Eisenberg said. "All the voice recognition and artificial intelligence happens on Earth at an IBM data centre in Frankfurt, Germany. The signal from CIMON has to travel through satellites and ground stations to the data centre and back. We focused on improving the robustness of this connection to prevent disruptions." CIMON relies on IBM's Watson speech recognition and synthesis software to converse with astronauts and respond to their commands. The first generation robot flew to the space station with Alexander Gerst in 2018. That robot later returned to Earth and is now touring German museums. The current robot, CIMON-2, is a second generation. Unlike its predecessor, it is more attuned to the astronauts' emotional states (thanks to the Watson Tone Analyzer). It also has a shorter reaction time.

Airbus and DLR have signed a contract with ESA for CIMON-2 to work with four humans on the orbital outpost in the upcoming years. During those four consecutive missions, engineers will first test CIMON's new software and then move on to allowing the sphere to participate in more complex experiments. During these new missions CIMON will, for the first time, guide and document complete scientific procedures, Airbus said in a statement. "Most of the activities that astronauts perform are covered by step by step procedures," Eisenberg said. "Normally, they have to use clip boards to follow these steps. But CIMON can free their hands by floating close by, listening to the commands and reading out the procedures, showing videos, pictures and clarifications on its screen." The robot can also look up additional information and document the experiments by taking videos and pictures. The scientists will gather feedback from the astronauts to see how helpful the sphere really was and identify improvements for CIMON's future incarnations.

Astrobiologist Paul Davies suggests viruses may form a vital part of ecosystems on other planets. The Guardian reports: "Viruses actually form part of the web of life," said Davies. "I would expect that if you've got microbial life on another planet, you're bound to have -- if it's going to be sustainable and sustained -- the full complexity and robustness that will go with being able to exchange genetic information." Viruses, said Davies, can be thought of as mobile, genetic elements. Indeed, a number of studies have suggested genetic material from viruses has been incorporated into the genomes of humans and other animals by a process known as horizontal gene transfer. "A friend of mine thinks most, but certainly a significant fraction, of the human genome is actually of viral origin," said Davies, whose new book, What's Eating the Universe?, was published last week.

According to Davies, while the importance of microbes to life is well known, the role of viruses is less widely appreciated. But he said if there is cellular life on other worlds, viruses or something similar, would probably exist to transfer genetic information between them. What's more, he said, it is unlikely alien life would be homogenous. "I don't think it's a matter that you go to some other planet, and there will just be you one type of microbe and it's perfectly happy. I think it's got to be a whole ecosystem," he added. While the thought of extraterrestrial viruses may seem alarming, Davies suggests there is no need for humans to panic. "The dangerous viruses are those that are very closely adapted to their hosts," he said. "If there is a truly alien virus, then chances are it wouldn't be remotely dangerous."

Davies [...] said it is also important should humans attempt to colonize another planet. "Most people think about, well, we would need to have very large spacecraft, and then sort of recycle things for the very long journey, and then all the technology you'd need to take," he said. "Actually, the toughest part of this problem is what would be the microbiology that you'd have to take -- it's no good just taking a few pigs and potatoes and things like that and hoping when you get to the other end it'll all be wonderful and self sustainable." While Covid has left most of us with a dim view of viruses, Davies said they are not all bad. "In fact, mostly, they're good," he said. [A]s Davies notes, a significant fraction of the human genome may be remnants of ancient viruses. "We hear about the microbiome inside us, and there's a planetary microbiome," said Davies. But, he argues there is also a human and planetaryvirome, with viruses playing a fundamental role in nature. "I think without viruses, there may be no sustained life on planet Earth," he said.

Some scientists have called it "superhuman immunity" or "bulletproof." But immunologist Shane Crotty prefers "hybrid immunity." "Overall, hybrid immunity to SARS-CoV-2 appears to be impressively potent," Crotty wrote in commentary in Science back in June. From a report: No matter what you call it, this type of immunity offers much-needed good news in what seems like an endless array of bad news regarding COVID-19. Over the past several months, a series of studies has found that some people mount an extraordinarily powerful immune response against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19. Their bodies produce very high levels of antibodies, but they also make antibodies with great flexibility -- likely capable of fighting off the coronavirus variants circulating in the world but also likely effective against variants that may emerge in the future.

"One could reasonably predict that these people will be quite well protected against most -- and perhaps all of -- the SARS-CoV-2 variants that we are likely to see in the foreseeable future," says Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at Rockefeller University who helped lead several of the studies. In a study published online last month, Bieniasz and his colleagues found antibodies in these individuals that can strongly neutralize the six variants of concern tested, including delta and beta, as well as several other viruses related to SARS-CoV-2, including one in bats, two in pangolins and the one that caused the first coronavirus pandemic, SARS-CoV-1. "This is being a bit more speculative, but I would also suspect that they would have some degree of protection against the SARS-like viruses that have yet to infect humans," Bieniasz says.

Animals are increasingly "shapeshifting" because of the climate crisis, researchers have said. From a report: Warm-blooded animals are changing their physiology to adapt to a hotter climate, the scientists found. This includes getting larger beaks, legs and ears to better regulate their body temperature. When animals overheat, birds use their beaks and mammals use their ears to disperse the warmth. Some creatures in warmer climates have historically evolved to have larger beaks or ears to get rid of heat more easily. These differences are becoming more pronounced as the climate warms. If animals fail to control their body temperature, they can overheat and die. Beaks, which are not covered by feathers and therefore not insulated, are a site of significant heat exchange, as are ears, tails and legs in mammals if not covered by fur.

The review, published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, found that the differences are particularly pronounced in birds. The author of the study, Sara Ryding of Deakin university, a bird researcher, said: "Shapeshifting does not mean that animals are coping with climate change and that all is fine. "It just means they are evolving to survive it -- but we're not sure what the other ecological consequences of these changes are, or indeed that all species are capable of changing and surviving." While the scientists say it is difficult to pinpoint climate breakdown as the sole cause of the shapeshifting, it is what the instances studied have in common across geographical regions and across a diverse array of species. Examples include several species of Australian parrot that have shown a 4-10% increase in bill size since 1871, positively correlated with the summer temperature each year.

Athletes don't get advance warning of drug tests. Police don't share schedules of planned raids. Yet America's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not seem convinced of the value of surprise in deterring bad behaviour [the link may be paywalled]. From a report: Every year it publishes a list of dates, spaced at six-day intervals, on which it will require state and local agencies to provide data on concentrations of harmful fine particulate matter (PM2.5), such as soot or cement dust. In theory, such a policy should enable polluters to spew as much filth into the air as they like 83% of the time, and clean up their act every sixth day. However, this ill-advised approach does offer one silver lining: it lets economists measure how much businesses change their behaviour when the proverbial parents are out of town.

A new paper by Eric Zou of the University of Oregon makes use of satellite images to spy on polluters at times when they think no one is watching. NASA, America's space agency, publishes data on the concentration of aerosol particles -- ranging from natural dust to man-made toxins -- all around the world, as seen from space. For every day in 2001-13, Mr Zou compiled these readings in the vicinity of each of America's 1,200 air-monitoring sites. Although some stations provided data continuously, 30-50% of them sent reports only once every six days. For these sites, Mr Zou studied how aerosol levels varied based on whether data would be reported. Sure enough, the air was consistently cleaner in these areas on monitoring days than it was the rest of the time, by a margin of 1.6%. Reporting schedules were almost certainly the cause: in areas where stations were retired, average pollution levels on monitoring days promptly rose to match the readings on non-monitoring days.

MIT's Technology Review reports on "Silicon Valley's latest wild bet on living forever," the newly-formed Altos Labs which it describes as "an ambitious new anti-aging company...

"Altos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life." The new company, incorporated in the US and in the UK earlier this year, will establish several institutes in places including the Bay Area, San Diego, Cambridge, UK and Japan, and is recruiting a large cadre of university scientists with lavish salaries and the promise that they can pursue unfettered blue-sky research on how cells age and how to reverse that process.

Some people briefed by the company have been told that its investors include Jeff Bezos...

Among the scientists said to be joining Altos are Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, a Spanish biologist at the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California, who has won notoriety for research mixing human and monkey embryos and who has predicted that human lifespans could be increased by 50 years. Salk declined to comment.
The article points out that a securities disclosure filed in California "indicates the company has raised at least $270 million, according to Will Gornall, a business school professor at the University of British Columbia who reviewed the document."

America's poison control centers are getting more calls this year from people who tried self-medicating with ivermectin, NPR reports — with at least 592 calls coming since July 1: According to the National Poison Data System, which collects information from the nation's 55 poison control centers, there was a 245% jump in reported exposure cases from July to August — from 133 to 459. Meanwhile, emergency rooms across the country are treating more patients who have taken the drug... Most patients are overdosing on a [high-concentration] version of the drug that is formulated to treat parasites in cows and horses... The National Poison Data System says 1,143 ivermectin exposure cases were reported between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31. That marks an increase of 163% over the same period last year...

Minnesota's Poison Control System is dealing with the same problem. According to the department, only one ivermectin exposure case was reported in July, but in August, the figure jumped to nine. Kentucky has seen similar increases. Thirteen misuse calls have been reported this year, Ashley Webb, director of the Kentucky Poison Control Center, told the Louisville Courier-Journal. "Of the calls, 75% were from people who bought ivermectin from a feed store or farm supply store and treated themselves with the animal product," Webb said. The other 25% were people who had a prescription, she added.

"You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it," the FDA said in a renewed warning late last month.

Those with a prescription from a health care provider should only fill it "through a legitimate source such as a pharmacy, and take it exactly as prescribed," the agency instructs. It also cautioned that large doses of the drug are "dangerous and can cause serious harm" and said that doses of ivermectin produced for animals could contain ingredients harmful to humans. The agency added: "Even the levels of ivermectin for approved human uses can interact with other medications, like blood-thinners. You can also overdose on ivermectin, which can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hypotension (low blood pressure), allergic reactions (itching and hives), dizziness, ataxia (problems with balance), seizures, coma and even death."
At least two more states — Louisiana and Washington — have also "issued alerts after an uptick in calls to poison control centers," according to a health writer for the Associated Press: By mid-August U.S. pharmacies were filling 88,000 weekly prescriptions for the medication, a 24-fold increase from pre-COVID levels, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Meanwhile, U.S. poison control centers have seen a five-fold increase in emergency calls related to the drug, with some incidents requiring hospitalization.

"A mystery lies deep within the Grand Canyon: one billion years' worth of rocks have disappeared," Space.com reported last week.

The BBC explains: Today geologists know that the youngest of the hard, crystalline rocks are 1.7 billion years old, whereas the oldest in the sandstone layer were formed 550 million years ago. This means there's more than a billion-year-gap in the geological record. To this day, no one knows what happened to the rocks in between.

While the missing rock is particularly obvious in the Grand Canyon, the phenomenon is ubiquitous. "It's one of these features that pretty much occurs under a lot of people's feet, when they don't even realise it," says Stephen Marshak, professor emeritus in the Department of Geology at the University of Illinois. He explains that in the centre of any continent, whether you're in the United States, Siberia or Europe, if you drill down far enough you'll hit the two layers of rock involved in this mysterious geological anomaly....

[F]inding out what happened during, and led to, the missing billion years is no trivial matter. There are two reasons for this. The first is that it just so happens to have occurred immediately before another inexplicable event — the sudden proliferation in the diversity of life on Earth 541 million years ago. The Cambrian explosion refers to an era when the oceans suddenly shifted from hosting a scattering of weird and unfamiliar creatures — such as triffid-like leaf-shaped animals and giant steamrollered ovals which continue to defy all efforts to categorise them — to an abundance of life, with many of the major taxonomic groups around today. It happened in the space of just 13-25 million years — an evolutionary twinkling of an eye...

The second is that it's thought Earth underwent radical climate change during the lost years — possibly turning into a giant ball of ice, with an almost entirely frozen surface. Very little is currently known about how this "snowball Earth" formed, or how life managed to cling on.
They share the three good theories. First, "snowball" — the earth develops a global ice sheet, with the speedy glaciers wearing away surface rocks.

The second theory is that it was all lost during the erosion of the supercontinent Rodinia.

And theory #3 is: confusion. The BBC cites new research that "suggests that the epic interruption in the geological record was not a single, discrete phenomenon — but instead is actually at least two mini-gaps, which look like one big one because they occurred at around the same time." Even the missing rocks on the two sides of America's Grand Canyon "may instead have vanished in several separate events over the course of several hundred million years."

"The four astronauts poised to launch on the first-ever all-civilian SpaceX mission this month will have one heck of a view once they reach orbit," reports Space.com: When the crew of Inspiration4 (as the mission is called) launches on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft on Sept. 15, their capsule will carry a huge glass dome in place of a docking port to offer the ultimate window on the world. Now, we have a clear idea of what that view may be like. "A look at Dragon's Cupola, which will provide our Inspiration4 astronauts with incredible views of Earth from orbit!" the Inspiration4 team wrote on Twitter Tuesday (Sept. 1) while sharing images of crewmembers trying out the dome window....

SpaceX's new cupola for its Crew Dragon spacecraft was first unveiled in March, when the full crew was revealed for the Inspiration4 mission. At the time, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk touted the window's 360-degree views of space as something that will be truly out of this world. Dragon does have other windows astronauts can use, but they are smaller and lie flat along the capsule's sides. "Probably most 'in space' you could possibly feel by being in a glass dome," SpaceX founder Musk wrote on Twitter during the announcement.

Inspiration4 is an all-civilian flight financed by the billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who is commanding the mission, with geoscientist and science communicator Sian Proctor as pilot. Hayley Arceneaux, a childhood bone cancer survivor and St. Jude physician's assistant, and data engineer Chris Sembroski round out the crew as mission specialists. Proctor and Sembroski were selected as part of a global contest for a trip on the flight, which will last about three days.

NBC News reports: Space company Firefly launched its inaugural Alpha rocket on a cloudless Thursday evening over the California coast. The Alpha rocket took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base's SLC-2 complex, climbing west over the Pacific. But about two and a half minutes after launch, Firefly's rocket began flipping end over end and exploded in the air.

The Vandenberg's Space Launch Delta 30 unit confirmed that it triggered the Alpha rocket's flight termination system, causing the explosion. "A team of investigators will convene to determine the cause of the failure," Space Launch Delta 30 said...

A Firefly statement emphasized that its Alpha test flight achieved "a number of" mission objectives, including: booster ignition, liftoff and supersonic speed, and collected "a substantial amount of flight data."

Long-time Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov quotes Quanta magazine: Today, the most powerful artificial intelligence systems employ a type of machine learning called deep learning. Their algorithms learn by processing massive amounts of data through hidden layers of interconnected nodes, referred to as deep neural networks. As their name suggests, deep neural networks were inspired by the real neural networks in the brain, with the nodes modeled after real neurons — or, at least, after what neuroscientists knew about neurons back in the 1950s, when an influential neuron model called the perceptron was born. Since then, our understanding of the computational complexity of single neurons has dramatically expanded, so biological neurons are known to be more complex than artificial ones. But by how much?

To find out, David Beniaguev, Idan Segev and Michael London, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron. They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected "neurons" to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron. Even the authors did not anticipate such complexity. "I thought it would be simpler and smaller," said Beniaguev. He expected that three or four layers would be enough to capture the computations performed within the cell.

Timothy Lillicrap, who designs decision-making algorithms at the Google-owned AI company DeepMind, said the new result suggests that it might be necessary to rethink the old tradition of loosely comparing a neuron in the brain to a neuron in the context of machine learning.
The paper's authors are now calling for changes in state-of-the-art deep network architecture in AI "to make it closer to how the brain works."

Misophonia is the "hatred of sound," or "sound rage," a condition in which people have intense emotional and physical reactions to trigger noises, often chewing or lip smacking. Misokinesia, on the other hand, is the "hatred of movement." Last week, Todd Handy, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, and his colleagues published the first study to focus solely on misokinesia in Nature Scientific Reports, with first author PhD student Sumeet Jaswall. Motherboard's Shayla Love reports the findings: The paper is mostly focused on determining how common misokinesia might be -- and their findings remarkably resemble the impromptu surveys Handy did on his classes. In a total of over 4,000 people, one-third said they were sensitive to watching others fidget, and that it caused negative emotions like anger, anxiety, and frustration to arise. Arjan Schroder, a postdoctoral researcher at Amsterdam UMC and the first author on the 2013 paper that coined misokinesia, said this prevalence matched what he has seen in his misophonia patient samples. Yet, as Handy's work shows, misokinesia might also be quite common in general populations too.

Handy and his colleagues first asked a group of students whether they ever had "strong negative feelings, thoughts, or physical reactions when seeing or viewing other peoples' fidgeting or repetitive movements," like someone's foot shaking, fingers tapping, or gum chewing. 38% of the students responded yes, and 31% reported having both misokinesia (visual) and misophonia (audio) sensitivity. Then they asked an older, more demographically diverse sample (not students) and found a similar prevalence: 36% of participants reported they had misokinesia sensitivity and 25.5% reported having both misokinesia and misophonia.

It's an intriguing finding that misokinesia and misophonia seem to exist both together and in isolation. On the subreddit for misophonia, one person shared that noises didn't bother them severely but fidgeting did. [...] Handy thinks the next big questions their study poses are how exactly misokinesia is related to misophonia, whether it can help better explain the mechanisms of misophonia, and whether it can potentially lead to coping strategies and treatments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: In a paper published Sept. 3 in Molecular Cell, [Stanley Qi, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University] and his collaborators announce what they believe is a major step forward for CRISPR: An efficient, multi-purpose, mini CRISPR system. Whereas the commonly used CRISPR systems -- with names like Cas9 and Cas12a denoting various versions of CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins -- are made of about 1000 to 1500 amino acids, their "CasMINI" has 529. The researchers confirmed in experiments that CasMINI could delete, activate and edit genetic code just like its beefier counterparts. Its smaller size means it should be easier to deliver into human cells and the human body, making it a potential tool for treating diverse ailments, including eye disease, organ degeneration and genetic diseases generally. The findings have been published in the journal Molecular Cell.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Berkeley News: Wearing face masks, particularly surgical masks, is truly effective in reducing the spread of COVID-19 in community settings, finds a new study led by researchers from Yale University, Stanford Medical School, the University of California, Berkeley, and the nonprofit Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). The study, which was carried out among more than 340,000 adults living in 600 rural communities in Bangladesh, is the first randomized trial to examine the effectiveness of face masks at reducing COVID-19 in a real-world setting, where mask use may be imperfect and inconsistent.

The results show that increased mask-wearing -- the result of a community-level mask distribution and in-person promotion campaign -- led to a significant reduction in the percentage of people with COVID-19, based on symptom reporting and SARS-CoV-2 antibody testing. The team tested both cloth and surgical masks and found especially strong evidence that surgical masks are effective in preventing COVID-19. In the study, surgical masks prevented one in three symptomatic infections among community members 60 years and older. The findings come at a crucial time in the U.S., when many in-person events have resumed and children -- including those who are under 12 and do not yet qualify for vaccination -- are returning to in-person school. The full press release and study can be found at their respective links.

A new study shows that increases in extreme winter weather in parts of the US are linked to accelerated warming of the Arctic. From a report: The scientists found that heating in the region ultimately disturbed the circular pattern of winds known as the polar vortex. This allowed colder winter weather to flow down to the US, notably in the Texas cold wave in February. The authors say that warming will see more cold winters in some locations. Over the past four decades, satellite records have shown how increasing global temperatures have had a profound effect on the Arctic.

Warming in the region is far more pronounced than in the rest of the world, and has caused a rapid shrinkage of summer sea ice. Scientists have long been concerned about the implications of this amplification of global change for the rest of the planet. This new study indicates that the warming in the Arctic is having a significant impact on winter weather in both North America and East Asia. The researchers detail a complex meteorological chain that connects this warmer region to a rotating pattern of cold air known as the polar vortex. The authors show that the melting of ice in the Barents and Kara seas leads to increased snowfall over Siberia and a transfer of excess energy that impacts the swirling winds in the stratosphere above the North Pole. The heat ultimately causes a stretching of the vortex which then enables extremely cold weather to flow down to the US. There has been an increase in these stretching events since satellite observations began in 1979. The scientists believe this vortex stretching process led to the deadly Texas cold wave in February this year.

John Charap, Emeritus professor of theoretical physics, Queen Mary University of London and Norman Dombey Emeritus, professor of theoretical physics, University of Sussex, writing at The Guardian: Your editorial on quantum physics starts with a quote from Richard Feynman -- "nobody understands quantum mechanics" -- and then says "that is no longer true." One of us (Norman Dombey) was taught quantum theory by Feynman at Caltech; the other (John Charap) was taught by Paul Dirac at Cambridge. Quantum theory was devised by several physicists including Dirac, Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s and 1930s, and Dirac made their work relativistic.

It is absurd to say that quantum mechanics is now understood whereas it was not 50 years ago. There have of course been advances in our understanding of quantum phenomena, but the conceptual framework of quantum physics remains as it was. The examples you give of nuclear plants, medical scans and lasers involve straightforward applications of quantum mechanics that were understood 50 years ago. The major advance in the understanding of quantum physics in this period is a theorem of John Bell from Cern, which states that quantum physics cannot be local -- that is to say that it permits phenomena to be correlated at arbitrarily large distances from each other.

This has now been demonstrated experimentally and leads to what is known as quantum entanglement, which is important in the development of quantum computers. But even these ideas were discussed by Albert Einstein and coworkers in 1935. The editorial goes on to say that "subatomic particles do not travel a path that can be plotted." If that were so, how can protons travel at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern and hit their target so that experiments can be performed? We agree with Phillip Ball, who wrote in Physics World that "quantum mechanics is still, a century after it was conceived, making us scratch our heads." There are many speculative proposals in contention but none have consensus support.

India has approved a new COVID vaccine that uses circular strands of DNA to prime the immune system against the virus SARS-CoV-2. Researchers have welcomed news of the first DNA vaccine for people to receive approval anywhere in the world, and say many other DNA vaccines may soon be hot on its heels. From a report: ZyCoV-D, which is administered into the skin without an injection, has been found to be 67% protective against symptomatic COVID-19 in clinical trials, and will likely start to be administered in India this month. Although the efficacy is not particularly high compared to that of many other COVID-19 vaccines, the fact that it is a DNA vaccine is significant, say researchers. It is proof of the principle that DNA vaccines work and can help in controlling the pandemic, says Peter Richmond, a paediatric immunologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth. "This is a really important step forward in the fight to defeat COVID-19 globally, because it demonstrates that we have another class of vaccines that we can use."

Close to a dozen DNA vaccines against COVID-19 are in clinical trials globally, and at least as many again are in earlier stages of development. DNA vaccines are also being developed for many other diseases. "If DNA vaccines prove to be successful, this is really the future of vaccinology" because they are easy to manufacture, says Shahid Jameel, a virologist at Ashoka University in Sonipat, India. The urgency of combating COVID-19 has fast-tracked the development of vaccines that use genetic technology, such as messenger RNA and DNA vaccines, says David Weiner, director of the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. RNA vaccines were quicker to show strong immune responses in clinical trials; they have now been delivered to hundreds of millions of people around the world. But DNA vaccines have a number of benefits, because they are easy to produce and the finished products are more stable than mRNA vaccines, which typically require storage at very low temperatures.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The Perseverance rover successfully drilled into a Martian rock on Thursday, creating an intact core sample that could one day be returned to Earth. But NASA wants better images to make sure the sample is safely in the tube before it's sealed up and stowed on the rover. So far, data sent back by the rover and initial images suggest an intact sample was inside the tube after Perseverance drilled into a rock selected by the mission's science team. After the initial images were taken, the rover vibrated the drill bit and tube for five one-second bursts to clear both of any residual material from outside of the tube. It's possible that this caused the sample to slide down further inside the tube.

The next images taken after this were "inconclusive due to poor sunlight conditions," according to the agency. Perseverance will use its cameras to take more images under better lighting conditions before conducting the next steps of the sampling process. The extra step of taking additional images before sealing and stowing the sample tube was added after Perseverance attempted to drill into another rock target on August 5. During that attempt, the rock crumbled and there was no sample present in the tube once it was stowed.

Perseverance is currently exploring the Citadelle location in Jezero Crater, which -- billions of years ago -- was once the site of an ancient lake. The rover's specific target was a rock called Rochette, which is about the size of a briefcase and is part of a half-mile ridgeline of rock outcrops and boulders. The mission team should receive more images of what's inside the sample tube by September 4. If images taken while the sun is at a better angle don't help the team determine whether a sample is present, the tube will be sealed and the rover will measure its volume. If Perseverance is able to successfully collect samples from Mars, they will be returned to Earth by future missions -- and they could reveal if microbial life ever existed on Mars.

Some scientists believe there is a ninth planet lurking out there in the inky blackness at the edge of the solar system. A new analysis (PDF) supports the notion that there's something out there, and it also narrows the region we need to search if we want to find the contentious Planet Nine. ExtremeTech reports: Astronomers started talking seriously about a ninth planet in 2016 when Caltech's Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin published a study detailing the unusual orbital behavior of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). These icy chunks of rock orbit the sun out beyond the orbit of Neptune. Pluto might not be a planet anymore, but it was the first KBO ever discovered. According to the original study, the uneven distribution of orbits among KBOs points to the presence of a massive object in the outer solar system. All searches for this planet have come up empty, though. While some astronomers believe Planet Nine is a good explanation for KBO orbits, there has also been intense criticism of the study. Now, Brown and Batygin are back with a new analysis that aims to address some of those complaints. Chiefly, other scientists noted that it's difficult to observe KBOs, so many searches focus on the more convenient regions of the sky. Thus, we could simply be looking a biased data.

The Planet Nine duo kept some of the original KBOs in the new data set, but it also includes new space rocks. They also discarded any object that appeared to be influenced by Neptune's gravity. The updated set of 11 KBOs still shows an unusual orbital distribution. The study claims there is just a 0.4 percent chance that these orbits are a coincidence. A greater than 99 percent chance that there is a massive object affecting KBOs sounds high, but it's actually lower than the chance assigned to Planet Nine in the original 2016 study. You could argue, of course, that this is a much more realistic number.

Based on the new simulations, Batygin has created a "treasure map" of sorts that points the way to Planet Nine's most likely orbital arc. That expansive area crosses the luminous plane of the Milky Way, which might have helped Planet Nine hide from previous searches. This includes a chance in the expected orbit, bringing Planet Nine in closer to Earth. The original analysis estimated it has an orbital period of 18,500 Earth years, but now it's believed to be in the neighborhood of 7,400 Earth years. The pair believe we are only a few years away from spotting Planet Nine, and it may be the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile.