Science

covid-shot-now-or-later?-just-getting-it-at-all-is-great,-officials-respond.

COVID shot now or later? Just getting it at all is great, officials respond.

CDC, COVID-19, fda, flu, health, HHS, Infectious disease, respiratory virus, RSV, Science, vaccines / /

Viral defences —

As the summer wave peaks, officials are prepping for the coming winter wave.

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A 13-year-old celebrates getting the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 13, 2021.

Enlarge / A 13-year-old celebrates getting the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 13, 2021.

With the impending arrival of the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccines approved yesterday, some Americans are now gaming out when to get their dose—right away while the summer wave is peaking, a bit later in the fall to maximize protection for the coming winter wave, or maybe a few weeks before a big family event at the end of the year? Of course, the group pondering such a question is just a small portion of the US.

Only 22.5 percent of adults and 14 percent of children in the country are estimated to have gotten the 2023–2024 vaccine. In contrast, 48.5 percent of adults and 54 percent of children were estimated to have gotten a flu shot. The stark difference is despite the fact that COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus is evolving faster than seasonal influenza viruses.

In a press briefing Friday, federal health officials were quick to redirect focus when reporters raised questions about the timing of COVID-19 vaccination in the coming months and the possibility of updating the vaccines twice a year, instead of just once, to keep up with an evolving virus that has been producing both summer and winter waves.

“The current problem is not that the virus is evolving so much, at least in terms of my estimation,” Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, told journalists. “It’s that we don’t have the benefits of the vaccine, which is [to say] that it’s not vaccines that prevent disease, it’s vaccination. It’s getting vaccines in arms.” When exactly to get the vaccine is a matter of personal choice, Marks went on, but the most important choice is to get vaccinated.

Estimates for this winter

The press briefing, which featured several federal health officials, was intended to highlight the government’s preparations and hopes for the upcoming respiratory virus season. The FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are urging all Americans to get their respiratory virus vaccines—flu, COVID-19, and RSV.

CDC Director Mandy Cohen introduced an updated data site that provides snapshots of local respiratory virus activity, national trends, data visualizations, and the latest guidance in one place. HHS, meanwhile, highlighted a new outreach campaign titled “Risk Less. Do More.” to raise awareness of COVID-19 and encourage vaccination, particularly among high-risk populations. For those not at high risk, health officials still emphasize the importance of vaccination to lower transmission and prevent serious outcomes, including long COVID. “There is no group without risk,” Cohen said, noting that the group with the highest rates of emergency department visits for COVID-19 were children under the age of 5, who are not typically considered high risk.

So far, CDC models are estimating that this year’s winter wave of COVID-19 will be similar, if not slightly weaker on some metrics, than last year’s winter wave, Cohen said. But she emphasized that many assumptions go into the modeling, including how the virus will evolve in the near future and the amount of vaccine uptake. The modeling assumes the current omicron variants stay on their evolutionary path and that US vaccination coverage is about the same as last year. Of course, beating last year’s vaccine coverage could blunt transmission.

COVID shot now or later? Just getting it at all is great, officials respond. Read More »

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Hydrogels can learn to play Pong

active matter, chemistry, hydrogels, materials science, Physics, polymers, Pong, Science, smart materials / /

It’s all about the feedback loops —

Work could lead to new “smart” materials that can learn and adapt to their environment.

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This electroactive polymer hydrogel “learned” to play Pong. Credit: Cell Reports Physical Science/Strong et al.

Pong will always hold a special place in the history of gaming as one of the earliest arcade video games. Introduced in 1972, it was a table tennis game featuring very simple graphics and gameplay. In fact, it’s simple enough that even non-living materials known as hydrogels can “learn” to play the game by “remembering” previous patterns of electrical stimulation, according to a new paper published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

“Our research shows that even very simple materials can exhibit complex, adaptive behaviors typically associated with living systems or sophisticated AI,” said co-author Yoshikatsu Hayashi, a biomedical engineer at the University of Reading in the UK. “This opens up exciting possibilities for developing new types of ‘smart’ materials that can learn and adapt to their environment.”

Hydrogels are soft, flexible biphasic materials that swell but do not dissolve in water. So a hydrogel may contain a large amount of water but still maintain its shape, making it useful for a wide range of applications. Perhaps the best-known use is soft contact lenses, but various kinds of hydrogels are also used in breast implants, disposable diapers, EEG and ECG medical electrodes, glucose biosensors, encapsulating quantum dots, solar-powered water purification, cell cultures, tissue engineering scaffolds, water gel explosives, actuators for soft robotics, supersonic shock-absorbing materials, and sustained-release drug delivery systems, among other uses.

In April, Hayashi co-authored a paper showing that hydrogels can “learn” to beat in rhythm with an external pacemaker, something previously only achieved with living cells. They exploited the intrinsic ability of the hydrogels to convert chemical energy into mechanical oscillations, using the pacemaker to apply cyclic compressions. They found that when the oscillation of a gel sample matched the harmonic resonance of the pacemaker’s beat, the system kept a “memory” of that resonant oscillation period and could retain that memory even when the pacemaker was turned off. Such hydrogels might one day be a useful substitute for heart research using animals, providing new ways to research conditions like cardiac arrhythmia.

For this latest work, Hayashi and co-authors were partly inspired by a 2022 study in which brain cells in a dish—dubbed DishBrain—were electrically stimulated in such a way as to create useful feedback loops, enabling them to “learn” to play Pong (albeit badly). As Ars Science Editor John Timmer reported at the time:

Pong proved to be an excellent choice for the experiments. The environment only involves a couple of variables: the location of the paddle and the location of the ball. The paddle can only move along a single line, so the motor portion of things only needs two inputs: move up or move down. And there’s a clear reward for doing things well: you avoid an end state where the ball goes past the paddles and the game stops. It is a great setup for testing a simple neural network.

Put in Pong terms, the sensory portion of the network will take the positional inputs, determine an action (move the paddle up or down), and then generate an expectation for what the next state will be. If it’s interpreting the world correctly, that state will be similar to its prediction, and thus the sensory input will be its own reward. If it gets things wrong, then there will be a large mismatch, and the network will revise its connections and try again.

There were a few caveats—even the best systems didn’t play Pong all that well—but the approach mostly worked. Those systems comprising either mouse or human neurons saw the average length of Pong rallies increase over time, indicating they might be learning the game’s rules. Systems based on non-neural cells, or those lacking a reward system, didn’t see this sort of improvement. The findings provided some evidence that neural networks formed from actual neurons spontaneously develop the ability to learn. And that could explain some of the learning capabilities of actual brains, where smaller groups of neurons are organized into functional units.

Hydrogels can learn to play Pong Read More »

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Town urges curfew over mosquito-spread disease that kills up to 50% of people

CDC, curfew, deaths, Eastern equine encephalitis, eee, health, Infectious disease, massachusetts, mosquito, Oxford, Science, virus / /

“Critical risk” —

Eastern Equine Encephalitis is very rare in the US, but when it strikes, it’s bad.

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A mosquito collected to test for mosquito-borne diseases.

Enlarge / A mosquito collected to test for mosquito-borne diseases.

A small town in Massachusetts is urging residents to stay indoors in the evenings after the spread of a dangerous mosquito-spread virus reached “critical risk level.”

The virus causes Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), which kills between 30 and 50 percent of people who are stricken—who are often children under the age of 15 and the elderly. Around half who survive are left permanently disabled, and some die within a few years due to complications. There is no treatment for EEE. So far, one person in the town—an elderly resident of Oxford—has already become seriously ill with neuroinvasive EEE.

EEE virus is spread by mosquitoes in certain swampy areas of the country, particularly in Atlantic and Gulf Coast states and the Great Lakes region. Mosquitoes shuttle the virus between wild birds and animals, including horses and humans. In humans, the virus causes very few cases in the US each year—an average of 11, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But given the extreme risk of EEE, health officials take any spread seriously.

On August 16, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced the state’s first case and declared a “critical risk level” in the four communities of Douglas, Oxford, Sutton, and Webster. These all cluster in Worcester county near the state’s borders with Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Curfew

While the state health department did not identify the man as a resident of Oxford, the town’s manager confirmed his residence in a memorandum Wednesday. The manager, Jennifer Callahan, reported that the man remains hospitalized. She also reported that a horse across the border in Connecticut had recently died of EEE.

Also on Wednesday, the four towns—Douglas, Oxford, Sutton, and Webster—issued a joint health advisory, which included a recommended curfew.

Last night, The Oxford Board of Health voted to adopt the advisory, according to the Boston Globe. The recommendation is for residents to avoid mosquito’s peak activity time. They should “finish outdoor activities before 6: 00 PM through September 30th, 2024 and before 5: 00 PM October 1st, 2024 until the first hard frost.” The advisory also recommends residents wear insect repellent, wear protective clothing, and mosquito-proof their homes.

Officials emphasized that the curfew is a recommendation, not mandatory. However, to use town properties—such as recreation fields—people will first need to file an indemnification form and provide proof of adequate insurance coverage to the town.

To date, there have been only three cases of EEE in the US this year. One in Massachusetts, one in Vermont, and the last in New Jersey. All three are neuroinvasive. The CDC says that about 30 percent of cases are fatal, while Massachusetts health officials report that about half of people who develop EEE in the state have died.

In 2019, there was a multi-state outbreak of EEE, leading to a high of 38 cases. Twelve of the cases occurred in Massachusetts, and six died.

Town urges curfew over mosquito-spread disease that kills up to 50% of people Read More »

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Astronomers think they’ve found a plausible explanation of the Wow! signal

aliens, astronomy, astrophysics, Physics, Science, WOW! signal / /

“I’m not saying it’s aliens…” —

Magnetars could zap clouds of atomic hydrogen, producing focused microwave beams.

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The Wow! signal represented as

Enlarge / The Wow! signal, represented as “6EQUJ5,” was discovered in 1977 by astronomer Jerry Ehman.

Public domain

An unusually bright burst of radio waves—dubbed the Wow! signal—discovered in the 1970s has baffled astronomers ever since, given the tantalizing possibility that it just might be from an alien civilization trying to communicate with us. A team of astronomers think they might have a better explanation, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv: clouds of atomic hydrogen that essentially act like a naturally occurring galactic maser, emitting a beam of intense microwave radiation when zapped by a flare from a passing magnetar.

As previously reported, the Wow! signal was detected on August 18, 1977, by The Ohio State University Radio Observatory, known as “Big Ear.” Astronomy professor Jerry Ehman was analyzing Big Ear data in the form of printouts that, to the untrained eye, looked like someone had simply smashed the number row of a typewriter with a preference for lower digits. Numbers and letters in the Big Ear data indicated, essentially, the intensity of the electromagnetic signal picked up by the telescope over time, starting at ones and moving up to letters in the double digits (A was 10, B was 11, and so on). Most of the page was covered in ones and twos, with a stray six or seven sprinkled in.

But that day, Ehman found an anomaly: 6EQUJ5 (sometimes misinterpreted as a message encoded in the radio signal). This signal had started out at an intensity of six—already an outlier on the page—climbed to E, then Q, peaked at U—the highest power signal Big Ear had ever seen—then decreased again. Ehman circled the sequence in red pen and wrote “Wow!” next to it. The signal appeared to be coming from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation, and the entire signal lasted for about 72 seconds. Alas, SETI researchers have never been able to detect the so-called “Wow! Signal” again, despite many tries with radio telescopes around the world.

One reason for the excited reaction is that such a signal had been proposed as a possible communication from extraterrestrial civilizations in a 1959 paper by Cornell University physicists Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi. Morrison and Cocconi thought that such a civilization might use the 1420 megahertz frequency naturally emitted by hydrogen, the universe’s most abundant element and, therefore, something an alien civilization would be familiar with. In fact, the Big Ear had been reassigned to the SETI project in 1973 specifically to hunt for possible signals. Ehman himself was quite skeptical of the “it could be aliens” hypothesis for several decades, although he admitted in a 2019 interview that “the Wow! signal certainly has the potential of being the first signal from extraterrestrial intelligence.”

Several other alternative hypotheses have been suggested. For instance, Antonio Paris suggested in 2016 that the signal may have come from the hydrogen cloud surrounding a pair of comets, 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs. This was rejected by most astronomers, however, in part because comets don’t emit strongly at the relevant frequencies. Others have suggested the signal was the result of interference from satellites orbiting the Earth, or a signal from Earth reflected off a piece of space debris.

Space maser!

Astrobiologist Abel Mendez of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo and his co-authors think they have the strongest astrophysical explanation to date with their cosmic maser hypothesis. The team was actually hunting for habitable exoplanets using signals from red dwarf stars. In some of the last archival data collected at the Arecibo radio telescope (which collapsed in 2020), they noticed several signals that were remarkably similar to the Wow! signal in terms of frequency—just much less intense (bright).

Mendez admitted to Science News that he had always viewed the Wow! signal as just a fluke—he certainly didn’t think it was aliens. But he realized that if the signals they were identifying had blazed brighter, even momentarily, they would be very much like the Wow! signal. As for the mechanism that caused such a brightening, Mendez et al. propose that a magnetar (a highly magnetic neutron star) passing behind a cloud of atomic hydrogen could have flared up with sufficient energy to produce stimulated emission in the form of a tightly focused beam of microwave radiation—a cosmic maser. (Masers are akin to lasers, except they emit microwave radiation rather than visible radiation.)

Proving their working hypothesis will be much more challenging, although there have been rare sightings of such naturally occurring masers from hydrogen molecules in space. But nobody has ever spotted an atomic hydrogen cloud with an associated maser, and that’s what would be needed to explain the intensity of the Wow! signal. That’s why other astronomers are opting for cautious skepticism. “A magnetar is going to produce [short] radio emissions as well. Do you really need this complicated maser stuff happening as well to explain the Wow! signal?” Michael Garrett of the University of Manchester told New Scientist. “Personally, I don’t think so. It just makes a complicated story even more complicated.”

arXiv, 2024. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2408.08513  (About DOIs).

Astronomers think they’ve found a plausible explanation of the Wow! signal Read More »

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CEO of failing hospital chain got $250M amid patient deaths, layoffs, bankruptcy

for-profit hospitals, health, health care, health care system, private equity, Science, steward / /

“Outrageous corporate greed” —

Steward Health Care System, run by CEO Ralph de la Torre, filed for bankruptcy in May.

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Hospital staff and community members held a protest in front of Carney Hospital in Boston on August 5 as Steward has announced it will close the hospital.

Enlarge / Hospital staff and community members held a protest in front of Carney Hospital in Boston on August 5 as Steward has announced it will close the hospital. “Ralph” refers to Steward’s CEO, Ralph de la Torre, who owns a yacht.

As the more than 30 hospitals in the Steward Health Care System scrounged for cash to cover supplies, shuttered pediatric and neonatal units, closed maternity wards, laid off hundreds of health care workers, and put patients in danger, the system paid out at least $250 million to its CEO and his companies, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The newly revealed financial details bring yet more scrutiny to Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, a Harvard University-trained cardiac surgeon who, in 2020, took over majority ownership of Steward from the private equity firm Cerberus. De la Torre and his companies were reportedly paid at least $250 million since that takeover. In May, Steward, which has hospitals in eight states, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Critics—including members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP)—allege that de la Torre and stripped the system’s hospitals of assets, siphoned payments from them, and loaded them with debt, all while reaping huge payouts that made him obscenely wealthy.

Alleged greed

For instance, de la Torre sold the land under the system’s hospitals to a large hospital landlord, Medical Properties Trust, leaving Steward hospitals on the hook for large rent payments. Under de la Torre’s leadership, Steward also paid a management consulting firm $30 million a year to “provide executive oversight and overall strategic directive.” But, de la Torre was the majority owner of the consulting firm, which also employed other Steward executives. As the WSJ put it, Steward “effectively paid its CEO’s firm, which employed Steward executives, for executive- management services for Steward.”

In 2021, while the COVID-19 pandemic strained hospitals, Steward distributed $111 million to shareholders. With de la Torre owning 73 percent of the company at the time, his share would have been around $81 million, the WSJ reported. That year, de la Torre bought a 190-foot yacht for $40 million. He also owns a $15 million custom-made luxury fishing boat called Jaruco. The Senate Help Committee, meanwhile, notes that a Steward affiliate owned two jets, one valued at $62 million and a second “backup” jet valued at $33 million.

In 2022, de la Torre got married in an elaborate wedding on Italy’s Amalfi Coast and bought a 500-acre Texas ranch for at least $7.2 million. His new wife, Nicole Acosta, 29, is a competitive equestrian who trains at a facility near the ranch. She competes on a horse that was sold in 2014 for $3.5 million, though it’s unclear how much the couple paid for it. Besides the ranch, de la Torre, 58, owns an 11,108-square-foot mansion in Dallas valued at $7.2 million, the WSJ reported.

While de la Torre was living a lavish lifestyle, Steward hospitals faced dire situations—as they had been for years. An investigation by the Senate HELP committee noted that Steward had shut down several hospitals in Massachusetts, Ohio, Arizona, and Texas between 2014 and this year, laying off thousands of health care workers and leaving communities in the lurch. It closed several pediatric wards in Massachusetts and Texas; in Florida, it closed neonatal units and eliminated maternity services. In Louisiana, Steward patients faced “immediate jeopardy.”

“Third-world medicine”

In a July hearing, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), ranking member of the HELP Committee, spoke of the conditions at Glenwood Regional Medical Center in West Monroe, Louisiana, which Steward allegedly mismanaged. “According to a report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a physician at Glenwood told a Louisiana state inspector that the hospital was performing ‘third-world medicine,'” Cassidy said.

Further, “one patient died while waiting for a transfer to another hospital because Glenwood did not have the resources to treat them,” the Senator said.  “Unfortunately, Glenwood is not unique,” he went on. “At a Steward-owned Massachusetts hospital, a woman died after giving birth when doctors realized mid-surgery that the supplies needed to treat her were previously repossessed due to Steward’s financial troubles.” The hospital reportedly owed the supplier $2.5 million in unpaid bills.

Additionally, the WSJ investigation dug up records that showed that a pest control company discovered 3,000 bats living in one of Steward’s Florida hospitals. In Arizona, a Phoenix-area hospital was without air conditioning during scorching temperatures, and its kitchen was closed for health-code violations. The state ordered it to shut down last week.

“Dr. de la Torre and his executive teams’ poor financial decisions and gross mismanagement of its hospitals is shocking,” Cassidy said. “Patients’ lives are at risk. The American people deserve answers.”

Outrage

Senate HELP Committee chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT) went further, saying that the US health care system “is designed not to make patients well, but to make health care executives and stockholders extraordinarily wealthy. … Perhaps more than anyone else in America, Ralph de la Torre, the CEO of Steward Health Care, epitomizes the type of outrageous corporate greed that is permeating throughout our for-profit health care system.”

Sanders lamented how de la Torre’s payouts could have instead benefited patients and communities, asking: “How many of Steward’s hospitals could have been prevented from closing down, how many lives could have been saved, how many health care workers would still have their jobs if Dr. de la Torre spent $150 million on high-quality health care instead of a yacht, two private jets and a luxury fishing boat?”

On July 25, the committee voted 16–4 to subpoena de la Torre so they could ask him such questions in person. To date, de la Torre has refused to voluntarily appear before the committee and declined to comment on the WSJ report. The committee’s vote marks the first time since 1981 that it has issued a subpoena.

Separately, Steward and de la Torre are under investigation by the Department of Justice over allegations of fraud and corruption in a deal to run hospitals in Malta.

CEO of failing hospital chain got $250M amid patient deaths, layoffs, bankruptcy Read More »

how-accurate-are-wearable-fitness-trackers?-less-than-you-might think

How accurate are wearable fitness trackers? Less than you might think

health, health tracker, health tracking, Science, syndication, Tech / /

some misleading metrics —

Wide variance underscores need for a standardized approach to validation of devices.

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How accurate are wearable fitness trackers? Less than you might think

Corey Gaskin

Back in 2010, Gary Wolf, then the editor of Wired magazine, delivered a TED talk in Cannes called “the quantified self.” It was about what he termed a “new fad” among tech enthusiasts. These early adopters were using gadgets to monitor everything from their physiological data to their mood and even the number of nappies their children used.

Wolf acknowledged that these people were outliers—tech geeks fascinated by data—but their behavior has since permeated mainstream culture.

From the smartwatches that track our steps and heart rate, to the fitness bands that log sleep patterns and calories burned, these gadgets are now ubiquitous. Their popularity is emblematic of a modern obsession with quantification—the idea that if something isn’t logged, it doesn’t count.

At least half the people in any given room are likely wearing a device, such as a fitness tracker, that quantifies some aspect of their lives. Wearables are being adopted at a pace reminiscent of the mobile phone boom of the late 2000s.

However, the quantified self movement still grapples with an important question: Can wearable devices truly measure what they claim to?

Along with my colleagues Maximus Baldwin, Alison Keogh, Brian Caulfield, and Rob Argent, I recently published an umbrella review (a systematic review of systematic reviews) examining the scientific literature on whether consumer wearable devices can accurately measure metrics like heart rate, aerobic capacity, energy expenditure, sleep, and step count.

At a surface level, our results were quite positive. Accepting some error, wearable devices can measure heart rate with an error rate of plus or minus 3 percent, depending on factors like skin tone, exercise intensity, and activity type. They can also accurately measure heart rate variability and show good sensitivity and specificity for detecting arrhythmia, a problem with the rate of a person’s heartbeat.

Additionally, they can accurately estimate what’s known as cardiorespiratory fitness, which is how the circulatory and respiratory systems supply oxygen to the muscles during physical activity. This can be quantified by something called VO2Max, which is a measure of how much oxygen your body uses while exercising.

The ability of wearables to accurately measure this is better when those predictions are generated during exercise (rather than at rest). In the realm of physical activity, wearables generally underestimate step counts by about 9 percent.

Challenging endeavour

However, discrepancies were larger for energy expenditure (the number of calories you burn when exercising) with error margins ranging from minus-21.27 percent to 14.76 percent, depending on the device used and the activity undertaken.

Results weren’t much better for sleep. Wearables tend to overestimate total sleep time and sleep efficiency, typically by more than 10 percent. They also tend to underestimate sleep onset latency (a lag in getting to sleep) and wakefulness after sleep onset. Errors ranged from 12 percent to 180 percent, compared to the gold standard measurements used in sleep studies, known as polysomnography.

The upshot is that, despite the promising capabilities of wearables, we found conducting and synthesizing research in this field to be very challenging. One hurdle we encountered was the inconsistent methodologies employed by different research groups when validating a given device.

This lack of standardization leads to conflicting results and makes it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about a device’s accuracy. A classic example from our research: one study might assess heart rate accuracy during high-intensity interval training, while another focuses on sedentary activities, leading to discrepancies that can’t be easily reconciled.

Other issues include varying sample sizes, participant demographics, and experimental conditions—all of which add layers of complexity to the interpretation of our findings.

What does it mean for me?

Perhaps most importantly, the rapid pace at which new wearable devices are released exacerbates these issues. With most companies following a yearly release cycle, we and other researchers find it challenging to keep up. The timeline for planning a study, obtaining ethical approval, recruiting and testing participants, analyzing results, and publishing can often exceed 12 months.

By the time a study is published, the device under investigation is likely to already be obsolete, replaced by a newer model with potentially different specifications and performance characteristics. This is demonstrated by our finding that less than 5 percent of the consumer wearables that have been released to date have been validated for the range of physiological signals they purport to measure.

What do our results mean for you? As wearable technologies continue to permeate various facets of health and lifestyle, it is important to approach manufacturers’ claims with a healthy dose of skepticism. Gaps in research, inconsistent methodologies, and the rapid pace of new device releases underscore the need for a more formalized and standardized approach to the validation of devices.

The goal here would be to foster collaborative synergies between formal certification bodies, academic research consortia, popular media influencers, and the industry so that we can augment the depth and reach of wearable technology evaluation.

Efforts are already underway to establish a collaborative network that can foster a richer, multifaceted dialogue that resonates with a broad spectrum of stakeholders—ensuring that wearables are not just innovative gadgets but reliable tools for health and wellness.The Conversation

Cailbhe Doherty, assistant professor in the School of Public Health, Physiotherapy and Sports Science, University College Dublin. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway

asteroid mining, Science, Space / /

Forging ahead —

“It’s not easy to ever raise for an asteroid mining company, right?”

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The Odin spacecraft passed vibration testing.

Enlarge / The Odin spacecraft passed vibration testing.

Astro Forge

When I first spoke with space entrepreneurs Jose Acain and Matt Gialich a little more than two years ago, I wondered whether I would ever talk to them again.

That is not meant to be offensive; rather, it is a reflection of the fact that the business they entered into—mining asteroids for platinum and other precious metals—is a perilous one. To date, NASA and other space agencies have spent billions of dollars returning a few grams of rocky material from asteroids. Humanity has never visited a metal-rich asteroid, although that will finally change with NASA’s $1.4 billion Psyche mission in 2029. And so commercial asteroid mining seems like a stretch, and indeed, other similarly minded startups have come and gone.

But it turns out that I did hear from Acain and Gialich again about their asteroid mining venture, AstroForge. On Tuesday the co-founders announced that they have successfully raised $40 million in Series A funding and shared plans for their next two missions. AstroForge has now raised a total of $55 million to date.

“It was challenging,” Gialich said of the latest fundraising effort, in an interview. “It’s not easy to ever raise for an asteroid mining company, right? Let’s be honest. We talked two years ago and you told us this. And you were not wrong. So a big part of this funding round was just showing people that we can actually build a spacecraft.”

Making some mistakes

In April 2023, the company launched a shoebox-sized cubesat, named the Brokkr-1 mission, on a SpaceX Transporter flight. Although the vehicle flew as intended for a while, AstroForge was unable to send the necessary commands to the spacecraft to initiate a demonstration of its space-based refining technology.

However, Gialich said AstroForge learned a lot from this mission and is working toward launching a second spacecraft named Odin. This will be a rideshare payload on the Intuitive Machines-2 mission, which is due to launch during the fourth quarter of this year. If successful, the Odin mission would be spectacular. About seven months after launching, Odin will attempt to fly by a near-Earth, metallic-rich asteroid while capturing images and taking data—truly visiting terra incognita. Odin would also be the first private mission to fly by a body in the Solar System beyond the Moon.

It has not been an easy project to develop. In the name of expediency, AstroForge initially sought to develop this spacecraft by largely outsourcing key components from suppliers—a practice known as horizontal integration. However, in March, the Odin spacecraft failed vibration testing. “Originally, our concept was to be different than SpaceX, and be horizontally integrated, not vertical,” Gialich said. “That was completely wrong. We have very much made changes there to be vertical.”

After the original vehicle failed vibration testing, which ensures it can survive the rigors of launch, AstroForge decided to bring forward a spacecraft being developed internally for the company’s third flight and use that for the Odin mission. To remain on track for a launch this year, the company had to complete vibration testing of the new, 100-kg Odin vehicle by August 1. AstroForge made that deadline but still must complete several other tests before shipping Odin to the launch pad.

Docking with an asteroid

On Tuesday, the company also announced plans for its third mission, Vestri (the company is naming its missions after Norse deities). This spacecraft will be about twice as large as Odin and is intended to return to the targeted metallic asteroid and dock with it. The docking mechanism is simple—since the asteroid is likely to be iron-rich, Vestri will use magnets to attach itself.

The plan is to use a mass spectrometer to sample and characterize the asteroid weekly until the spacecraft fails. AstroForge seeks to launch Vestri on another Intuitive Machines mission in 2025. Vestri’s goals are highly ambitious, as no private spacecraft has ever landed on a body beyond the Moon.

AstroForge is tracking several candidate asteroids as the target body for Odin and Vestri, Gialich said, each of which is about 400 meters across. He won’t make a final decision for several months. The company does not want to tip its hand due to the interest of potential competitors, including China-based Origin Space.

However, there is no shortage of potential targets. Scientists estimate that there are about 10 million near-Earth asteroids, which come within one astronomical unit (the distance between the Sun and Earth) of our planet. Perhaps 3 to 5 percent of these are rich in metals, so there are potentially hundreds of thousands of candidates for mining.

Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway Read More »

that-book-is-poison:-even-more-victorian-covers-found-to-contain-toxic-dyes

That book is poison: Even more Victorian covers found to contain toxic dyes

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Arsenic and old books —

Old books with toxic dyes may be in universities, public libraries, private collections.

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Composite image showing color variation of emerald green bookcloth on book spines, likely a result of air pollution

Enlarge / Composite image showing color variation of emerald green bookcloth on book spines, likely a result of air pollution

In April, the National Library of France removed four 19th century books, all published in Great Britain, from its shelves because the covers were likely laced with arsenic. The books have been placed in quarantine for further analysis to determine exactly how much arsenic is present. It’s part of an ongoing global effort to test cloth-bound books from the 19th and early 20th centuries because of the common practice of using toxic dyes during that period.

Chemists from Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, have also been studying Victorian books from that university’s library collection in order to identify and quantify levels of poisonous substances in the covers. They reported their initial findings this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Denver. Using a combination of spectroscopic techniques, they found that several books had lead concentrations more than twice the limit imposed by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

The Lipscomb effort was inspired by the University of Delaware’s Poison Book Project, established in 2019 as an interdisciplinary crowdsourced collaboration between university scientists and the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. The initial objective was to analyze all the Victorian-era books in the Winterthur circulating and rare books collection for the presence of an arsenic compound called cooper acetoarsenite, an emerald green pigment that was very popular at the time to dye wallpaper, clothing, and cloth book covers. Book covers dyed with chrome yellow—favored by Vincent van Gogh— aka lead chromate, were also examined, and the project’s scope has since expanded worldwide.

The Poison Book Project is ongoing, but 50 percent of the 19th century cloth-case bindings tested so far contain lead in the cloth across a range of colors, as well as other highly toxic heavy metals: arsenic, chromium, and mercury. The French National Library’s affected books included the two-volume Ballads of Ireland by Edward Hayes (1855), an anthology of translated Romanian poetry (1856), and the Royal Horticultural Society’s book from 1862–1863.

Levels were especially high in those bindings that contain chrome yellow. However, the project researchers also determined that, for the moment at least, the chromium and lead in chrome yellow dyed book covers are still bound to the cloth. The emerald green pigment, on the other hand, is highly “friable,” meaning that the particles break apart under even small amounts of stress or friction, like rubbing or brushing up against the surface—and that pigment dust is hazardous to human health, particularly if inhaled.

Lipscomb University undergraduate Leila Ais cuts a sample from a book cover to test for toxic dyes.

Enlarge / Lipscomb University undergraduate Leila Ais cuts a sample from a book cover to test for toxic dyes.

Kristy Jones

The project lists several recommendations for the safe handling and storage of such books, such as wearing nitrile gloves—prolonged direct contact with arsenical green pigment, for instance, can lead to skin lesions and skin cancer—and not eating, drinking, biting one’s fingernails or touching one’s face during handling, as well as washing hands thoroughly and wiping down surfaces. Arsenical green books should be isolated for storage and removed from circulating collections, if possible. And professional conservators should work under a chemical fume hood to limit their exposure to arsenical pigment dust.

X-ray diffraction marks the spot

In 2022, Libscomb librarians heard about the Poison Book Project and approached the chemistry department about conducting a similar analytical survey of the 19th century books in the Beaman Library. “These old books with toxic dyes may be in universities, public libraries, and private collections,” said Abigail Hoermann, an undergraduate studying chemistry at Lipscomb University who is among those involved in the effort, led by chemistry professor Joseph Weinstein-Webb. “So, we want to find a way to make it easy for everyone to be able to find what their exposure is to these books, and how to safely store them.”

The team relied upon X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to conduct a broad survey of the collection to determine the presence of arsenic or other heavy metals in the covers, followed by plasma optical emission spectroscopy to measure the concentrations in snipped samples from book covers where such poisons were found. They also took their analysis one step further by using X-ray diffraction to identify the specific pigment molecules within the detected toxic metals.

The results so far: Lead and chromium were present in several books in the Lipscomb collection, with high levels of lead and chromium in some of those samples. The highest lead level measured was more than twice the CDC limit, while the highest chromium concentration was six times the limit.

The Lipscomb library decided to seal any colored 19th century books not yet tested in plastic for storage pending analysis. Those books, now known to have covers colored with dangerous dyes, have been removed from public circulation and also sealed in plastic bags, per Poison Book Project recommendations.

The XRD testing showed that lead(II) chromate was present in a few of those heavy metals as well—a compound of the chrome yellow pigment. In fact, they were surprised to find that the book covers contained far more lead than chromium, given that there are equal amounts of both in lead(II) chromate. Further research is needed, but the working hypothesis is that there may be other lead-based pigments—lead(II) oxide, perhaps, or lead(II) sulfide—in the dyes used on those covers.

That book is poison: Even more Victorian covers found to contain toxic dyes Read More »

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Rocket Lab entered “hero mode” to finish Mars probes—now it’s up to Blue Origin

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The two spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission at Rocket Lab's factory in Long Beach, California.

Enlarge / The two spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission at Rocket Lab’s factory in Long Beach, California.

Two NASA spacecraft built by Rocket Lab are on the road from California to Florida this weekend to begin preparations for launch on Blue Origin’s first New Glenn rocket.

These two science probes must launch between late September and mid-October to take advantage of a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that only happens once every 26 months. NASA tapped Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission with a $20 million contract.

Last November, the space agency confirmed the $79 million ESCAPADE mission will launch on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. With this piece of information, the opaque schedule for Blue Origin’s long-delayed first New Glenn mission suddenly became more clear.

The launch period opens on September 29. The two identical Mars-bound spacecraft for the ESCAPADE mission, nicknamed Blue and Gold, are now complete. Rocket Lab announced Friday that its manufacturing team packed the satellites and shipped them from their factory in Long Beach, California. Over the weekend, they arrived at a clean room facility just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where technicians will perform final checkups and load hydrazine fuel into both spacecraft, each a little more than a half-ton in mass.

Then, if Blue Origin is ready, ground teams will connect the ESCAPADE spacecraft with the New Glenn’s launch adapter, encapsulate the probes inside the payload fairing, and mount them on top of the rocket.

“There’s a whole bunch of checking and tests to make sure everything’s OK, and then we move into fueling, and then we integrate with the launch vehicle. So it’s a big milestone,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s lead scientist from the University of California Berkeley’s Space Science Laboratory. “There have been some challenges along the way. This wasn’t easy to make happen on this schedule and for this cost. So we’re very happy to be where we are.”

Racing to the finish line

But there’s a lot for Blue Origin to accomplish in the next couple of months if the New Glenn rocket is going to be ready to send the ESCAPADE mission toward Mars in this year’s launch period. Blue Origin has not fully exercised a New Glenn rocket during a launch countdown, hasn’t pumped a full load of cryogenic propellants into the launch vehicle, and hasn’t test-fired a full complement of first stage or second stage engines.

These activities typically take place months before the first launch of a large new orbital-class rocket. For comparison, SpaceX test-fired its first fully assembled Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad about three months before its first flight in 2010. United Launch Alliance completed a hot-fire test of its new Vulcan rocket on the launch pad last year, about seven months before its inaugural flight.

However, Blue Origin is making visible progress toward the first flight of New Glenn, after years of speculation and few outward signs of advancement. Earlier this year, the company raised a full-scale, 320-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and loaded it with liquid nitrogen, a cryogenic substitute for the methane and liquid hydrogen fuel it will burn in flight.

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Meteorites give the Moon its extremely thin atmosphere

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The exosphere gets the vapors —

Impacts that vaporize bits of the lunar surface maintain the Moon’s thin atmosphere.

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Graphic of a spacecraft above a grey planetary body, with a distant sun in the background.

Enlarge / Artist’s rendition of the LADEE mission above the lunar surface.

The Moon may not have much of an atmosphere, mostly because of its weak gravitational field (whether it had a substantial atmosphere billions of years ago is debatable). But it is thought to presently be maintaining its tenuous atmosphere—also known as an exosphere—because of meteorite impacts.

Space rocks have been bombarding the Moon for its 4.5-billion-year existence. Researchers from MIT and the University of Chicago have now found that lunar soil samples collected by astronauts during the Apollo era show evidence that meteorites, from hulking meteors to micrometeoroids no bigger than specks of dust, have launched a steady flow of atoms into the exosphere.

Though some of these atoms escape into space and others fall back to the surface, those that do remain above the Moon create a thin atmosphere that keeps being replenished as more meteorites crash into the surface.

“Over long timescales, micrometeorite impact vaporization is the primary source of atoms in the lunar atmosphere,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances.

Ready for launch

When NASA sent its orbiter LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer) to the Moon in 2013, the mission was intended to find out the origins of the Moon’s atmosphere. LADEE observed more atoms in the atmosphere during meteor showers, which suggested impacts had something to do with the atmosphere. However, it left questions about the mechanism that converts impact energy into a diffuse atmosphere.

To find these answers, a team of MIT and University of Chicago researchers, led by professor Nicole Nie of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, needed to analyze the isotopes of elements in lunar soil that are most susceptible to the effects of micrometeoroid impacts. They chose potassium and rubidium.

Potassium and rubidium ions are especially prone to two processes: impact vaporization and ion sputtering.

Impact vaporization results from particles colliding at high speeds and generating extreme amounts of heat that excite atoms enough to vaporize the material they are in and send them flying. Ion sputtering involves high-energy impacts that set atoms free without vaporization. Atoms that are released by ion sputtering tend to have more energy and move faster than those released by impact vaporization.

Either of these can create and maintain the lunar atmosphere in the wake of meteorite impacts.

So, if atoms sent into the atmosphere by ion sputtering have an energy advantage, then why did the researchers find that most atoms in the atmosphere actually come from impact vaporization?

Touching back down

Since the lunar soil samples provided by NASA had previously had their lighter and heavier isotopes of potassium and rubidium quantified, Lie’s team used calculations to determine which collision process is more likely to keep different isotopes from fleeing the atmosphere.

The researchers found that atoms transferred to the atmosphere by ion sputtering are sent zooming at such high energies that they often reach escape velocity—the minimum velocity needed to escape the Moon’s already feeble gravity—and continue to travel out into space. Atoms that end up in the atmosphere can also be lost from the atmosphere, after all.

The fraction of atoms that reach escape velocity after impact vaporization depends on the temperature of those atoms. Lower energy levels associated with impact vaporization result in lower temperatures, which give atoms a lower chance of escape.

“Impact vaporization is the dominant long-term source of the lunar atmosphere, likely contributing more than 65 percent of atmospheric [potassium] atoms, with ion sputtering accounting for the rest,” Lie and her team said in the same study.

There are other ways atoms are lost from the lunar atmosphere. It is mostly lighter ions that tend to stick around in the exosphere, with ions falling back to the surface if they’re too heavy. Others are photoionized by electromagnetic radiation from the solar wind and often carried off into space by solar wind particles.

What we’ve learned about the lunar atmosphere through lunar soil could influence studies of other bodies. Impact vaporization has already been found to launch atoms into the exosphere of Mercury, which is thinner than the Moon’s. Studying Martian soil, which may land on Earth with sample return missions in the future, could also give more insight into how meteorite impacts affect its atmosphere.

As we approach a new era of manned lunar missions, the Moon may have more to tell us about where its atmosphere comes from—and where it goes.

Science Advances, 2024.  DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adm7074

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Passing part of a medical licensing exam doesn’t make ChatGPT a good doctor

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Smiling doctor discussing medical results with a woman.

Enlarge / For now, “you should see a doctor” remains good advice.

ChatGPT was able to pass some of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) tests in a study done in 2022. This year, a team of Canadian medical professionals checked to see if it’s any good at actual doctoring. And it’s not.

ChatGPT vs. Medscape

“Our source for medical questions was the Medscape questions bank,” said Amrit Kirpalani, a medical educator at the Western University in Ontario, Canada, who led the new research into ChatGPT’s performance as a diagnostic tool. The USMLE contained mostly multiple-choice test questions; Medscape has full medical cases based on real-world patients, complete with physical examination findings, laboratory test results, and so on.

The idea behind it is to make those cases challenging for medical practitioners due to complications like multiple comorbidities, where two or more diseases are present at the same time, and various diagnostic dilemmas that make the correct answers less obvious. Kirpalani’s team turned 150 of those Medscape cases into prompts that ChatGPT could understand and process.

This was a bit of a challenge because OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, has a restriction against using it for medical advice, so a prompt to straight-up diagnose the case didn’t work. This was easily bypassed, though, by telling the AI that diagnoses were needed for an academic research paper the team was writing. The team then fed it various possible answers, copy/pasted all the case info available at Medscape, and asked ChatGPT to provide the rationale behind its chosen answers.

It turned out that in 76 out of 150 cases, ChatGPT was wrong. But the chatbot was supposed to be good at diagnosing, wasn’t it?

Special-purpose tools

At the beginning of 2024. Google published a study on the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE), a large language model purpose-built to diagnose diseases based on conversations with patients. AMIE outperformed human doctors in diagnosing 303 cases sourced from New England Journal of Medicine and ClinicoPathologic Conferences. And AMIE is not an outlier; during the last year, there was hardly a week without published research showcasing an AI performing amazingly well in diagnosing cancer and diabetes, and even predicting male infertility based on blood test results.

The difference between such specialized medical AIs and ChatGPT, though, lies in the data they have been trained on. “Such AIs may have been trained on tons of medical literature and may even have been trained on similar complex cases as well,” Kirpalani explained. “These may be tailored to understand medical terminology, interpret diagnostic tests, and recognize patterns in medical data that are relevant to specific diseases or conditions. In contrast, general-purpose LLMs like ChatGPT are trained on a wide range of topics and lack the deep domain expertise required for medical diagnosis.”

Passing part of a medical licensing exam doesn’t make ChatGPT a good doctor Read More »

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Rocket Report: ULA is losing engineers; SpaceX is launching every two days

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Every other day —

The first missions of Stoke Space’s reusable Nova rocket will fly in expendable mode.

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A Falcon 9 booster returns to landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station following a launch Thursday with two WorldView Earth observation satellites for Maxar.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 booster returns to landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station following a launch Thursday with two WorldView Earth observation satellites for Maxar.

Welcome to Edition 7.07 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX has not missed a beat since the Federal Aviation Administration gave the company a green light to resume Falcon 9 launches after a failure last month. In 19 days, SpaceX has launched 10 flights of the Falcon 9 rocket, taking advantage of all three of its Falcon 9 launch pads. This is a remarkable cadence in its own right, but even though it’s a small sample size, it is especially impressive right out of the gate after the rocket’s grounding.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

A quick turnaround for Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab launched its 52nd Electron rocket on August 11 from its private spaceport on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, Space News reports. The company’s light-class Electron rocket deployed a small radar imaging satellite into a mid-inclination orbit for Capella Space. This was the shortest turnaround between two Rocket Lab missions from its primary launch base in New Zealand, coming less than nine days after an Electron rocket took off from the same pad with a radar imaging satellite for the Japanese company Synspective. Capella’s Acadia 3 satellite was originally supposed to launch in July, but Capella requested a delay to perform more testing of its spacecraft. Rocket Lab swapped its place in the Electron launch sequence and launched the Synspective mission first.

Now, silence at the launch pad … Rocket Lab hailed the swap as an example of the flexibility provided by Electron, as well as the ability to deliver payloads to specific orbits that are not feasible with rideshare missions, according to Space News. For this tailored launch service, Rocket Lab charges a premium launch price over the price of launching a small payload on a SpaceX rideshare mission. However, SpaceX’s rideshare launches gobble up the lion’s share of small satellites within Rocket Lab’s addressable market. On Friday, a Falcon 9 rocket is slated to launch 116 small payloads into polar orbit. Rocket Lab, meanwhile, projects just one more launch before the end of September and expects to perform 15 to 18 Electron launches this year, a record for the company but well short of the 22 it forecasted earlier in the year. Rocket Lab says customer readiness is the reason it will be far short of projections.

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.

Defense contractors teaming up on solid rockets. Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are joining forces to kickstart solid rocket motor production, announcing a strategic teaming agreement today that could see new motors roll off the line as early as 2025, Breaking Defense reports. The new agreement could position a third vendor to enter into the ailing solid rocket motor industrial base, which currently only includes L3Harris subsidiary Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman in the United States. Both companies have struggled to meet demands from weapons makers like Lockheed and RTX, which are in desperate need of solid rocket motors for products such as Javelin or the PAC-3 missiles used by the Patriot missile defense system.

Pressure from startups … Demand for solid rocket motors has skyrocketed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the United States and its partners sought to backfill stocks of weapons like Javelin and Stinger, as well as provide motors to meet growing needs in the space domain. Although General Dynamics has kept its interest in the solid rocket motor market quiet until now, several defense tech startups, such as Ursa Major Technologies, Anduril, and X-Bow Systems, have announced plans to enter the market. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Going polar with crew. SpaceX will fly the first human spaceflight over the Earth’s poles, possibly before the end of this year, Ars reports. The private Crew Dragon mission will be led by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Chun Wang, and he will be joined by a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker whom he has befriended in recent years. The “Fram2” mission, named after the Norwegian research ship Fram, will launch into a polar corridor from SpaceX’s launch facilities in Florida and fly directly over the north and south poles. The three- to five-day mission is being timed to fly over Antarctica near the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, to afford maximum lighting.

Wang’s inclination is Wang’s prerogative … Wang told Ars he wanted to try something new, and flying a polar mission aligned with his interests in cold places on Earth. He’s paying the way on a commercial basis, and SpaceX in recent years has demonstrated it can launch satellites into polar orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, something no one had done in more than 50 years. The highest-inclination flight ever by a human spacecraft was the Soviet Vostok 6 mission in 1963 when Valentina Tereshkova’s spacecraft reached 65.1 degrees. Now, Fram2 will fly repeatedly and directly over the poles.

Rocket Report: ULA is losing engineers; SpaceX is launching every two days Read More »