An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: A fascinating new study from a team of US researchers has used machine learning techniques to develop algorithms that can analyze naturalistic driving data and detect mild cognitive impairment and dementia in a driver. The work is still in the preliminary stages, however, the researchers claim it could be possible in the future to detect early signs of dementia using either a smartphone app or devices incorporated into car software systems. The research utilized data from a novel long-term study called LongROAD (The Longitudinal Research on Aging Drivers), which tracked nearly 3,000 older drivers for up to four years, offering a large longitudinal dataset.

Over the course of the LongROAD study, 33 subjects were diagnosed with MCI and 31 with dementia. A series of machine learning models were trained on the LongROAD data, tasked with detecting MCI and dementia from driving behaviors. "Based on variables derived from the naturalistic driving data and basic demographic characteristics, such as age, sex, race/ethnicity and education level, we could predict mild cognitive impairment and dementia with 88 percent accuracy," says Sharon Di, lead author on the new study. Although age was the number one factor for detecting MCI or dementia, a number of driving variables closely followed. These include, "the percentage of trips traveled within 15 miles (24 km) of home ... the length of trips starting and ending at home, minutes per trip, and number of hard braking events with deceleration rates 0.35 g." Using driving variables alone, the models could still predict those MCI or dementia drivers with 66 percent accuracy. The new study was published in the journal Geriatrics.

It's taken 17 years, with many setbacks and some deaths, and still Richard Branson's space mission is yet to launch. From a report: Richard Branson was running almost 15 years late. But as we rode into the Mojave desert on the morning of 12 December 2018, he was feeling upbeat and untroubled by the past. He wore jeans, a leather jacket and the easy smile of someone used to being behind schedule. Branson hadn't exactly squandered the past 15 years. He'd become a grandfather, moved to a private island in the Caribbean and expanded Virgin's business empire into banking, hotels, gyms, wedding dresses and more. But he was staking his legacy on Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company he formed in 2004. The idea was to build a rocketship with seats for eight -- two pilots, six passengers -- that would be carried aloft by a mothership, released about 45,000ft in the air and then zoom just beyond the lower limit of space, float around for a few minutes, before returning to Earth. He was charging $200,000 a seat. It did not initially seem like such a crazy idea. That year, a boutique aviation firm in Mojave, California, two hours north of Los Angeles, had built a prototype mothership and rocketship that a pair of test pilots flew to space three times, becoming the first privately built space craft. Branson hired the firm to design, build and test him a bigger version of the craft.

But the undertaking was proving far more difficult than Branson anticipated. An accidental explosion in 2007 killed three engineers. A mid-air accident in 2014 destroyed the ship and killed a test pilot, forcing Virgin Galactic to more or less start over. I approached the company shortly after the accident to ask if I could embed with them and write a story about their space programme for the New Yorker. I worked on the story for four years. After it came out, in August 2018, I spent another two years reporting and writing a book about the test pilots who fly Branson's spaceship. Amid the tragedies and setbacks, Branson remained optimistic of the prospect of imminent success. In 2004: "It is envisaged that Virgin Galactic will open for business by the beginning of 2005 and, subject to the necessary safety and regulatory approvals, begin operating flights from 2007." Then, in 2009: "I'm very confident that we should be able to meet 2011." Later, in 2017: "We are hopefully about three months before we are in space, maybe six months before I'm in space." Meanwhile, other private space companies, such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, were making progress. Branson confessed that had he known in 2004 what he knew now, "I wouldn't have gone ahead with the project... We simply couldn't afford it."

His record on delivering promises has made him a polarising figure. Branson has appeared on lists of both hucksters and heroes. One poll ranked him second among people whom British children should emulate; Jesus Christ came third. His biographer describes him as "a card player with a weak hand who plays to strength," but also a "self-made and self-deprecating man whose flamboyance endears him to aspiring tycoons, who snap up his books and flock to his lectures to glean the secrets of fortune-hunting." But all of that was in the past; the turmoil and hardship would hopefully make the triumph all that much sweeter. For he and I knew as we headed into the desert that tomorrow could finally be the day that Virgin Galactic went to space.

Widely circulating coronavirus variants and persistent hesitancy about vaccines will keep the goal out of reach. The virus is here to stay, but vaccinating the most vulnerable may be enough to restore normalcy. From a report: Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term "herd immunity" came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives. Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable -- at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever. Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon. Continued immunizations, especially for people at highest risk because of age, exposure or health status, will be crucial to limiting the severity of outbreaks, if not their frequency, experts believe. "The virus is unlikely to go away," said Rustom Antia, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "But we want to do all we can to check that it's likely to become a mild infection." The shift in outlook presents a new challenge for public health authorities. The drive for herd immunity -- by the summer, some experts once thought possible -- captured the imagination of large segments of the public. To say the goal will not be attained adds another "why bother" to the list of reasons that vaccine skeptics use to avoid being inoculated. Yet vaccinations remain the key to transforming the virus into a controllable threat, experts said. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration's top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts' thinking. "People were getting confused and thinking you're never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is," he said.

Four astronauts in a SpaceX Dragon capsule successfully splashed down into the Gulf of Mexico this morning at 2:57 a.m. ET — returning from the International Space Station in the first U.S. crew splashdown in darkness since the Apollo 8 moonshot in 1968.

Phys.org reports: It was an express trip home, lasting just 6 1/2 hours... "We welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX," SpaceX's Mission Control radioed moments after splashdown. "For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you've earned 68 million miles on this voyage...."

The 167-day mission was the longest for a crew capsule launching from the U.S. The previous record of 84 days was set by NASA's final Skylab station astronauts in 1974. Saturday night's undocking left seven people at the space station, four of whom arrived a week ago via SpaceX...

Once finished with their medical checks on the ship, the astronauts planned to hop on a helicopter for the short flight to shore, then catch a plane straight to Houston for a reunion with their families. "It's not very often you get to wake up on the space station and go to sleep in Houston," chief flight director Holly Ridings told reporters.

The astronauts' capsule, Resilience, will head back to Cape Canaveral for refurbishment for SpaceX's first private crew mission in September... A tech billionaire has purchased the entire three-day flight, which will orbit 75 miles (120 kilometers) above the space station. He'll fly with a pair of contest winners and a physician assistant from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, his designated charity for the mission.

SpaceX's next astronaut launch for NASA will follow in October.

Scientific American has published an opinion piece by the principle investigator for a project called SPARK, launched five years ago "to harness the power of big data by engaging hundreds of thousands of individuals with autism and their family members to participate in research."

The article calls autism "a remarkably heterogeneous disorder that affects more than five million Americans and has no FDA-approved treatments," arguing that the more people who participate in their research, "the deeper and richer these data sets become, catalyzing research that is expanding our knowledge of both biology and behavior to develop more precise approaches to medical and behavioral issues." SPARK is the world's largest autism research study to date with over 250,000 participants, more than 100,000 of whom have provided DNA samples through the simple act of spitting in a tube. We have generated genomic data that have been de-identified and made available to qualified researchers. SPARK has itself been able to analyze 19,000 genes to find possible connections to autism; worked with 31 of the nation's leading medical schools and autism research centers; and helped thousands of participating families enroll in nearly 100 additional autism research studies.

Genetic research has taught us that what we commonly call autism is actually a spectrum of hundreds of conditions that vary widely among adults and children. Across this spectrum, individuals share core symptoms and challenges with social interaction, restricted interests and/or repetitive behaviors. We now know that genes play a central role in the causes of these "autisms," which are the result of genetic changes in combination with other causes including prenatal factors. To date, research employing data science and machine learning has identified approximately 150 genes related to autism, but suggests there may be as many as 500 or more...

But in order to get answers faster and be certain of these results, SPARK and our research partners need a huge sample size: "bigger data." To ensure an accurate inventory of all the major genetic contributors, and learn if and how different genetic variants contribute to autistic behaviors, we need not only the largest but also the most diverse group of participants. The genetic, medical and behavioral data SPARK collects from people with autism and their families is rich in detail and can be leveraged by many different investigators. Access to rich data sets draws talented scientists to the field of autism science to develop new methods of finding patterns in the data, better predicting associated behavioral and medical issues, and, perhaps, identifying more effective supports and treatments...

We know that big data, with each person representing their unique profile of someone impacted by autism, will lead to many of the answers we seek.

"Scientists have spotted one of the largest stellar flares ever recorded in our galaxy," reports Space.com: The jets of plasma shot outward from the sun's nearest neighbor, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. The flare, which was around 100 times more powerful than any experienced in our solar system, could change the way scientists think about solar radiation and alien life...

On May 1, 2019, the team captured the mega flare, which shone for just 7 seconds and was mainly visible in the ultraviolet spectrum. "The star went from normal to 14,000 times brighter when seen in ultraviolet wavelengths over the span of a few seconds," lead author Meredith MacGregor, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement...

The flare on Proxima Centauri was extremely powerful compared with those emitted by the sun. Unlike flares from the sun, this one also emitted different kinds of radiation. In particular, it produced a huge surge of ultraviolet light and radio waves — known as "millimeter radiation...." The new findings suggest that stellar flares given off by red dwarfs are much more violent than previously expected and could reduce the likelihood of alien life developing around them.
Proxima Centauri is orbited by two explanets, one of which "is considered to be Earth-like and lies within the star's habitable zone — the distance from a star that could support the development of life, according to the researchers..."

But in a statement, the leader authors now points out that Proxima Centauri's planets "are getting hit by something like this not once in a century, but at least once a day, if not several times a day."

NASA has suspended work on SpaceX's new $2.9 billion lunar lander contract while a federal watchdog agency adjudicates two protests over the award, the agency said Friday. The Verge reports: Putting the Human Landing System (or HLS) work on hold until the GAO makes a decision on the two protests means SpaceX won't immediately receive its first chunk of the $2.9 billion award, nor will it commence the initial talks with NASA that would normally take place at the onset of a major contract. Elon Musk's SpaceX was picked by NASA on April 16th to build the agency's first human lunar lander since the Apollo program, as the agency opted to rely on just one company for a high-profile contract that many in the space industry expected to go to two companies.

As a result, two companies that were in the running for the contract, Blue Origin and Dynetics, protested NASA's decision to the Government Accountability Office, which adjudicates bidding disputes. Blue Origin alleges the agency unfairly "moved the goalposts at the last minute" and endangered NASA's speedy 2024 timeline by only picking SpaceX. "Pursuant to the GAO protests, NASA instructed SpaceX that progress on the HLS contract has been suspended until GAO resolves all outstanding litigation related to this procurement," NASA spokeswoman Monica Witt said in a statement.

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter completed its fourth and most ambitious test flight across Mars on Friday. CNET reports: NASA JPL tweeted "Success," saying Ingenuity went father and faster than ever before. NASA also shared a nifty image from one of the Perseverance rover's cameras showing the helicopter in flight in the distance. Ingenuity had originally been scheduled for a fourth flight on Thursday, but a known glitch prevented the rotorcraft from switching into flight mode. The chopper remained safe and healthy and ready for the redo.

The plan for the latest test was to fly the helicopter to an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters), collect images of the landscape below, hover and then head back to its takeoff spot. The flight path was set to take it 436 feet (133 meters) downrange and last 117 seconds. It takes time to send the data back from Mars, but NASA is expecting to receive a bounty of photos snapped by the helicopter during the flight. This will help prove the rotorcraft's potential for use as a scout that can assist surface vehicles like rovers as they explore from the ground. NASA said the plucky chopper already "has met or surpassed all of its technical objectives." That gave the helicopter team license to try the more daring fourth flight to push its capabilities in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

Astronomers reconstructed a space rock's path before it exploded over southern Africa in 2018 and sprinkled the Kalahari with meteorites. From a report: On the morning of June 2, 2018, an asteroid was seen careening toward us at 38,000 miles per hour. It was going to impact Earth, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Astronomers were beside themselves with excitement. Five feet long and weighing about the same as an adult African elephant, this space rock posed no threat. But the early detection of this asteroid, only the second to be spotted in space before hitting land, was a good test of our ability to spot larger, more dangerous asteroids. Moreover, it afforded scientists the chance to study the asteroid before its obliteration, quickly narrow down the impact site and obtain some of the most pristine, least weathered meteorite samples around. Later that day, a fireball almost as bright as the sun illuminated Botswana's darkened sky before exploding 17 miles above ground with the force of 200 tons of TNT. Fragments fell like extraterrestrial buckshot into a national park larger than the Netherlands.

Immediately, Botswanan scientists and guides joined with international meteorite experts to hunt for the asteroid's wreckage. As of November 2020, the team has found 24 individual meteorites. And thanks to the telltale geology of these rocky leftovers, observations of their path to Earth and the memories of a dead NASA spacecraft, scientists were able to unspool the history of this asteroid with breathtaking detail. As reported earlier this month in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, Botswana's off-world visitor was once part of Vesta, a gigantic ramshackle asteroid forged at the dawn of the solar system. About 22 million years ago, another asteroid crashed into one of its lonely hills, leaving a modest crater and sending countless shards of Vesta on a space odyssey. One of them was the object that fell over southern Africa in 2018, an explosive end to a lonely journey. 'It is such an amazing thing to be in possession of such a rare specimen with so much history attached to it," said Mohutsiwa Gabadirwe, a geologist and curator at the Botswana Geoscience Institute who is a co-author.

Named 2018 LA, the asteroid was first seen by the Catalina Sky Survey, a trio of telescopes north of Tucson, Ariz. Additional telescopes, like the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey, saw it too, allowing scientists to tentatively map out an impact site in southern Africa. Peter Jenniskens, a meteorite expert at the SETI Institute and study author, said that the initial search area was a 1,400-square-mile patch in Botswana. Hoping to shrink it down, he visited local businesses with Oliver Moses of the Okavango Research Institute. They located security camera footage at a hotel and gas stations that had recorded the fireball, allowing them to more precisely pinpoint the fall site: a (still-sizable) spot within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. This was a surreal place to go meteorite hunting. Bat-eared foxes and warthogs strolled past, lions stealthily stalked and slaughtered giraffes while leopards lounged in trees. Wardens from Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks protected the search party in case a fanged predator got too close for comfort. The meteorites also looked a lot like animal poop, meaning the team were frequently bamboozled by coprological impostors. 'It was a totally unusual experience for all of us,' said Mr. Gabadirwe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists from Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have pieced together a timeline of how brain and body size evolved in mammals over the last 150 million years. The findings, published in Science Advances, show that brain size relative to body size -- long considered an indicator of animal intelligence -- has not followed a stable scale over evolutionary time. The international team of 22 scientists, including biologists, evolutionary statisticians, and anthropologists, compared the brain mass of 1400 living and extinct mammals. For the 107 fossils examined -- among them ancient whales and the most ancient Old World monkey skull ever found -- they used endocranial volume data from skulls instead of brain mass data. The brain measurements were then analyzed along with body size to compare the scale of brain size to body size over deep evolutionary time.

According to the study, "big-brained" humans, dolphins, and elephants, for example, attained their proportions in different ways. Elephants increased in body size, but surprisingly, even more in brain size. Dolphins, on the other hand, generally decreased their body size while increasing brain size. Great apes showed a wide variety of body sizes, with a general trend towards increases in brain and body size. In comparison, ancestral hominins, which represent the human line, showed a relative decrease in body size and increase in brain size compared to great apes. The authors say that these complex patterns urge a re-evaluation of the deeply rooted paradigm that comparing brain size to body size for any species provides a measure of the species' intelligence. The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.

Artem S. Tashkinov shares a report from Ars Technica: Health regulators in Brazil say that doses of Russia's Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine contain a cold-causing virus capable of replicating in human cells. The unintended presence of the virus in the vaccine can "lead to infections in humans and can cause damage and death, especially in people with low immunity and respiratory problems, among other health problems," Brazil's Health Regulatory Agency, Anvisa, said Wednesday in a translated statement. Russia has unequivocally denied the claim, lobbed legal threats at Anvisa, and accused the respected regulators of being politically motivated to reject the vaccine. Still, Brazil's findings raise serious questions about the quality and safety of the vaccine, which is now being used in many countries. The findings also support concerns of Slovak regulators, who said earlier this month that batches of Sputnik V they received did not "have the same characteristics and properties" as the Sputnik V vaccine that was described in a peer-reviewed publication and found to be 91.6 percent effective.

Moreover, quality-control issues weren't the end of Anvisa's concerns. In an overall evaluation of the Russian vaccine, Brazil's regulators found its safety and efficacy were based on insufficient, limited, and sometimes faulty data and analyses. "Flaws... were identified in all stages of clinical studies," Anvisa said. The agency also reported that its inspectors who traveled to Russia to assess the vaccine's production were barred from vaccine facilities at Gamaleya Institute, which developed Sputnik V. Russia touts that "the safety and efficacy of Sputnik V has been confirmed by 61 regulators in countries where the vaccine has been authorized." However, Brazil's regulators said that of the 51 countries it contacted, only 14 were using the vaccine, and most of those countries did not have a tradition of vigilant drug-safety monitoring.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Since the novel coronavirus began its global spread, influenza cases reported to the World Health Organization have dropped to minuscule levels. The reason, epidemiologists think, is that the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading also stop the flu. Influenza viruses are transmitted in much the same way as SARS-CoV-2, but they are less effective at jumping from host to host. As Scientific American reported last fall, the drop-off in flu numbers was both swift and universal. Since then, cases have stayed remarkably low. "There's just no flu circulating," says Greg Poland, who has studied the disease at the Mayo Clinic for decades. The U.S. saw about 600 deaths from influenza during the 2020-2021 flu season. In comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago.

Because each year's flu vaccine is based on strains that have been circulating during the past year, it is unclear how next year's vaccine will fare, should the typical patterns of the disease return. [...] Public health experts are grateful for the reprieve. Some are also worried about a lost immune response, however. If influenza subsides for several years, today's toddlers could miss a chance to have an early-age response imprinted on their immune system. That could be good or bad, depending on what strains circulate during the rest of their life. For now, future flu transmission remains a roll of the dice.

schwit1 shares a report from Threatpost: Quick-response (QR) codes used by a COVID-19 contact-tracing program were hijacked by a man who simply slapped up scam QR codes on top to redirect users to an anti-vaccination website, according to local police. He now faces two counts of "obstructing operations carried out relative to COVID-19 under the Emergency Management Act," the South Australia Police said in a statement announcing the arrest. His arrest may just be a drop in the bucket: Reports of other anti-vax campaigners doing the same thing abound. Law enforcement added an additional warning to would-be QR code scammers: "Any person found to be tampering or obstructing with business QR codes will likely face arrest and court penalty of up to $10,000." The police said no personal data was breached, but the incident highlights that truly all an attacker needs is a printer and a pack of Avery labels to do real damage.

In this case, the QR codes were being used by the South Australian government's official CovidSafe app to access a device's camera, scan the code and collect real-time location data to be used for contact tracing in case of a COVID-19 outbreak, ABC News Australia reported. That's a lot of personal data linked to a single QR code just waiting to be stolen. "In this instance, people who scanned the illegitimate QR code were redirected to a website distributing misinformation from the anti-vaxxer community," Bill Harrod, vice president of public sector at Ivanti, told Threatpost. "While this is concerning, the outcome could have been far more perilous."

Today, Blue Origin revealed that it will be selling the first tickets for rides on its space tourism rocket called New Shepard. According to CNBC, the first ticket (or tickets?) will go on sale starting next week, on Wednesday, May 5. From the report: Blue Origin did not reveal how much tickets will cost, only saying that more details will come on May 5 to those who submit their name and email on a form on the company's website. "Sign up to learn how you can buy the very first seat on New Shepard," according to the company's website. The announcement's video features Bezos going out to the capsule of New Shepard after the company's test flight earlier this month. It shows him driving across the Texas desert, the remote location of the New Shepard launch facility -- notably at the wheel of a Rivian R1T electric truck, which is emblazoned with Blue Origin's signature feather.

New Shepard is designed to carrying as many as six people at a time on a ride past the edge of space, with the capsules on previous test flights reaching an altitude of more than 340,000 feet (or more than 100 km). The capsule, which has massive windows to give passengers a view, spends as much as 10 minutes in zero gravity before returning to Earth. The rocket launches vertically, with the booster detaching and returning to land at a concrete pad nearby. The capsule's return is slowed down by a set of parachutes, before softly landing in the desert.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Coming on the heels of the Neuralink announcement earlier this month -- complete with video showing a monkey playing Pong with its mind, thanks to a wireless brain implant -- researchers with the BrainGate Consortium have successfully demonstrated a high-bandwidth wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) in two tetraplegic human subjects. The researchers described their work in a recent paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering. As for the latest Neuralink breakthrough, Ars Science Editor John Timmer wrote last week that most of the individual pieces of Neuralink's feat have been done before -- in some cases, a decade before (BrainGate is among those earlier pioneers). But the company has taken two important steps toward its realization of a commercial BCI: miniaturizing the device and getting it to communicate wirelessly, which is harder than it sounds.

According to [John Simeral of Brown University, a member of the BrainGate consortium and lead author of the new paper], the BrainGate wireless system makes the opposite tradeoff -- higher bandwidth and fidelity -- because it wants all the finer details of the data for its ongoing research. In that regard, it complements the Utrecht and Neuralink systems in the BCI space. The new BrainGate system is based on the so-called Brown Wireless Device (BWD) designed by Arto Nurmikko, and it replaces the cables with a small transmitter that weighs about 1.5 ounces. The transmitter sits atop the user's head and connects wirelessly to an implant electrode array inside the motor cortex.

There were two participants in the clinical trial -- a 35-year-old man and a 65-year-old man -- both of whom were paralyzed by spinal cord injuries. They were able to continuously use the BCI for a full 24 hours, even as they slept, yielding continuous data over that time period. (The medical-grade battery lasts for 36 hours.) "We can learn more about the neural signals that way because we can record over long periods of time," said Simeral. "And we can also begin to learn a little bit about how people actually will use the system, given the freedom to do so." His team was encouraged by the fact that one of its study participants often asked if they could leave the wireless transmitters on a little longer. He has a head tracker he can use as a fallback, but several nights a week, he would choose to use the wireless BrainGate system because he liked it. "Right now, we typically decode or interpret the spiking activity from networks of neurons," said Simeral. "There are other encoding mechanisms that have been studied in the brain that have to do with how the oscillations in the brain are related to these spiking signals. There's information in the different oscillation frequencies that might relate to, for example, sleep state, attention state, other phenomenon that we care about. Without a continuous recording, you've surrendered the ability to learn about any of those. Learning how this all happens in the human brain in the home as people are behaving and having different thoughts requires having a broadband system recording from the human brain."

"The ability to potentially have individuals with disability using these systems at home on demand, I think is a great step forward," said Simeral. "More broadly, going forward, having more players in the field, having more funding, is important. I see nothing but great things from all of these interactions. For our own work, we see things on the horizon that were impossible five years ago, when there was essentially nobody in the corporate world interested in this space. So I think it's a very promising time."

According to a new study from the CDC, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were 94 percent effective in preventing hospitalization for COVID-19 among people age 65 and older. The Hill reports: The study provides new evidence on the benefits of vaccination, and builds on results from the clinical trials by adding real-world evidence from 417 hospitalized adults in 14 states from January to March. "This multisite U.S. evaluation under real-world conditions suggests that vaccination provided protection against COVID-19-associated hospitalization among adults aged [65 and older]," the study states.

The 94 percent efficacy rate was for people who were fully vaccinated, meaning they were at least two weeks past their second dose. For people who were only partially vaccinated, meaning they were more than two weeks past the first dose but less than two weeks past the second dose, effectiveness was 64 percent. Notably, no significant effectiveness was found for people who were less than 14 days past their first dose, highlighting that it takes some time for protection to kick in and that people should not disregard precautions right away. The results show that as vaccinations spread, hospitalizations and deaths are set to decline, the CDC said.

An astronaut who flew on one of the most famous space missions of all time has died. From a report: Michael Collins, 90, was part of the three-member crew on Apollo 11, the first lunar landing mission in 1969. Unlike Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, he never walked on the moon. Collins stayed behind and piloted the command module as it circled above. Because of that, Collins is often called the 'forgotten astronaut'. Collins had been battling cancer. In a statement released by his family, "He spent his final days peacefully, with his family by his side. Mike always faced the challenges of life with grace and humility, and faced this, his final challenge in the same way."

NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk said the nation lost a true pioneer, "NASA mourns the loss of this accomplished pilot and astronaut, a friend of all who seek to push the envelope of human potential. Whether his work was behind the scenes or on full view, his legacy will always be as one of the leaders who took America's first steps into the cosmos. And his spirit will go with us as we venture toward farther horizons." When Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon and uttered the famous phrase, "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed," Collins was in orbit, 60 miles above, just as busy, and just as excited, telling the team back in Houston he was listening to communications with his comrades, and it was "fantastic." Aldrin and Armstrong were on the lunar surface just under 22 hours. The world was transfixed. Seeing them bunny-hop along, take pictures and collect lunar samples during their single, short moonwalk. All the while, Collins circled the moon. Looking down at the barren lunar landscape and peering back at the Earth. "The thing I remember most is the view of planet Earth from a great distance," he said later. "Tiny. Very shiny. Blue and white. Bright. Beautiful. Serene and fragile."

Maya Wei-Haas writes via National Geographic: Standing among patches of muddy snow on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland, I bent down to pick up a piece of the planet that should have been hidden miles below my feet. On that chilly February day, I was out with a pair of geologists to see an exposed section of Earth's mantle. While this layer of rock is usually found between the planet's crust and core, a segment peeks out of the scrubby Maryland forest, offering scientists a rare chance to study Earth's innards up close. Even more intriguing, the rock's unusual chemical makeup suggests that this piece of mantle, along with chunks of lower crust scattered around Baltimore, was once part of the seafloor of a now-vanished ocean.

Over the roughly 490 million years since their formation, these hunks of Earth were smashed by shifting tectonic plates and broiled by searing hot fluids rushing through cracks, altering both their composition and sheen. Mantle rock is generally full of sparkly green crystals of the mineral olivine, but the rock in my hand was surprisingly unremarkable to look at: mottled yellow-brown stone occasionally flecked with black. Because of this geologic clobbering, scientists have struggled for more than a century to determine the precise origins of this series of rocks. Now, Guice and his colleagues have applied a fresh eye and state-of-the-art chemical analyses to the set of rocky exposures in Baltimore. Their work shows that the seemingly bland series of stones once lurked underneath the ancient Iapetus Ocean.

More than half a billion years ago, this ocean spanned some 3,000 to 5,000 miles, cutting through what is now the United States' eastern seaboard. Much of the land where the Appalachian mountains now stand was on one side of the ocean, and parts of the modern East Coast were on the other. "It's a huge ocean between them, and we've got a little bit of that ocean smooshed in Baltimore," says Guice, lead author of a recent study describing the find in the journal Geosphere.

kackle writes: I just received an email telling me that "Popular Science" magazine is no more. That is, it is to be delivered to readers from now on only via ones and zeros. I can't say I had a subscription since its beginnings in 1872, but I did learn much from the rag and will sincerely miss it. "Today, we're unveiling our biggest change in my tenure: Popular Science is now a fully digital magazine," writes Editor-in-Chief Corinne Iozzio. In addition to "redesigned" and "reimagined stories" made especially for mobile devices, Iozzio notes that their various apps "include an archive of 15-plus years of back issues..."

"The mediums may change, but even after all these evolutions and iterations, our core belief remains as fixed and focused as it was in 1872: Embracing science and tech means living in the realm of possibility."

Cleaner skies over South Asia that resulted from pandemic lockdowns last year likely affected the timing of snowmelt in the Indus River basin of Pakistan and India, researchers reported on Monday. From a report: The lockdowns cut emissions of soot and other pollutants, as people drove less and the generation of electricity, largely from coal, was reduced. That meant less soot was deposited on snow, where it absorbs sunlight, emits heat and causes faster melting. The cleaner snow in 2020 reflected more sunlight and did not melt as fast, the researchers said. In all, that delayed runoff into the Indus River of more than than one and a half cubic miles of melt water, they calculated, similar to the volume of some of the largest reservoirs in the United States. More than 300 million people depend on the Indus for water, much of which starts as snow in the high peaks of the Karakoram and other mountain ranges.

Timing of melt water runoff in the spring and summer can be crucial for managing water supplies over time. In many parts of the world, climate change has affected this timing, with warmer temperatures and a shift to more rain and less snow causing more snow to melt sooner. Slower runoff can thus be beneficial, helping managers of reservoirs store more water and maintain a steady flow over the year. Ned Bair, a snow hydrologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the lead researcher, said that while they could not prove conclusively that the pandemic was the reason for the timing delay, "it seems unlikely that anything else would have led to that." India imposed a nationwide lockdown in late March last year that continued through early May. Several studies showed rapid improvements in air quality in that period, particularly in and around Delhi, which is notorious for having some of the most unhealthy air in the world.