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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

ESA[*] is expanding its bedrest programme that allows researchers to study how human bodies react to living in space – without leaving their bed.

[...] Bedrest studies simulate aspects of spaceflight by placing volunteers in bed for long periods of time with their head 6° below horizontal. At all times one shoulder must touch the bed – meals, showers and toilet breaks included.

ESA has conducted many bedrest studies with Medes in Toulouse, France, and at the German aerospace centre DLR's ':envihab' facility in Cologne, Germany. The space agency is now welcoming the Jožef Stefan Institute based in Planica, Slovenia, to conduct a new round of 60-day studies: one in Toulouse and one in Planica.

The Planica site is a fitting addition, since it is located at high altitude and there is less atmospheric pressure – much like a in future lunar habitat, which adds to simulation. The centre allows researchers to tweak environmental conditions, such as oxygen levels in the room. Testing volunteers in low oxygen levels, or hypoxia, is relevant for future space missions where the confined environment of spacecraft and space habitats could contain less oxygen.

Each site in France, Germany and Slovenia has a centrifuge that can spin volunteers to recreate gravity pulling towards their feet while laying down. Artificial gravity could counteract some of the changes in the human body during space exploration.

"The goal is to definitively test measures that reduce the unwanted effects of living in weightlessness," explains ESA's science coordinator for human research Angelique Van Ombergen, "we have a long history at ESA of conducting bedrest studies and this round will put all our knowledge gained towards fine-tuning and working out the best techniques."

[...]Water bed for dry immersion

In a first for ESA, another type of terrestrial study with Medes will use dry-immersion baths. Similar to bath tubs, containers will hold a total of 20 female study participants in suspension for five days each.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.npr.org/2020/02/18/805291279/losing-sleep-over-the-quest-for-a-perfect-nights-rest

If you're having a hard time falling asleep, that sleep tracker on your wrist might be to blame.

And there's a name for this new kind of insomnia of the digital age: orthosomnia.

It's "when you just really become fixated on having this perfect sleep via tracker," said Seema Khosla, medical director at the North Dakota Center for Sleep. "And then you start worrying about it, and you wind up giving yourself insomnia."

[...] But in an irony of our digital lifestyles, for some people, perfecting that sleep score becomes an end unto itself — so much so that they can lose sleep over it.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Lawmakers open groundwater fight against bottled water companies:

Washington state, land of sprawling rainforests and glacier-fed rivers, might soon become the first in the nation to ban water bottling companies from tapping spring-fed sources.

The proposal is one of several efforts at the state and local level to fend off the fast-growing bottled water industry and protect local groundwater. Local activists throughout the country say bottling companies are taking their water virtually for free, depleting springs and aquifers, then packaging it in plastic bottles and shipping it elsewhere for sale.

"I was literally beyond shocked," said Washington state Sen. Reuven Carlyle, who sponsored the bill to ban bottling companies from extracting groundwater. It was advanced by a Senate committee last week.

"I was jolted to the core to realize the depth and breadth and magnitude of how they have lawyered up in these small towns to take advantage of water rights," the Democrat said. "The fact that we have incredibly loose, if virtually nonexistent, policy guidelines around this is shocking and a categorical failure."

Elsewhere, lawmakers in Michigan and Maine also have filed bills to restrict the bottling of groundwater or tax the industry. Local ballot measures have passed in Oregon and Montana to restrict the industry, though in Montana, Flathead County's zoning change remains tied up in court.

"The Washington state bill is groundbreaking," said Mary Grant, a water policy specialist with the environmental group Food and Water Watch. "As water scarcity is becoming a deeper crisis, you want to protect your local water supply so it goes for local purposes. (Bottled water) is not an industry that needs to exist."

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

New guidelines on aspirin in primary prevention:

In a commentary published online ahead of print in the American Journal of Medicine, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's Schmidt College of Medicine and collaborators from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and the Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, provide guidance to health care providers and their patients. They urge that to do the most good for the most patients in primary care, health care providers should make individual clinical judgements about prescribing aspirin on a case-by-case basis.

"All patients suffering from an acute heart attack should receive 325 mg of regular aspirin promptly, and daily thereafter, to reduce their death rate as well as subsequent risks of heart attacks and strokes," said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., Dr.P.H., senior author, the first Sir Richard Doll Professor, and senior academic advisor in FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine. "In addition, among long-term survivors of prior heart attacks or occlusive strokes, aspirin should be prescribed long-term unless there is a specific contraindication. In primary prevention, however, the balance of absolute benefits, which are lower than in secondary prevention patients, and risks of aspirin, which are the same as in secondary prevention, is far less clear."

The researchers emphasize that, based on the current totality of evidence, any judgments about prescribing long-term aspirin therapy for apparently healthy individuals should be based on individual clinical judgments between the health care provider and each of his or her patients that weighs the absolute benefit on clotting against the absolute risk of bleeding.

[...] "General guidelines for aspirin in primary prevention do not seem to be justified," said Hennekens. "As is generally the case, the primary care provider has the most complete information about the benefits and risks for each of his or her patients."

Journal Reference:

Alexander Gitin, Marc A Pfeffer, David L. DeMets, Charles H. Hennekens. ASPIRIN IN PRIMARY PREVENTION: NEEDS INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENTS. The American Journal of Medicine, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2020.01.006

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

New image shows Betelgeuse isn't dimming evenly:

From Earth's perspective, one of the brightest stars in the sky is the red supergiant Betelgeuse. Found in the constellation of Orion, it's large enough and close enough that when it's destroyed in an inevitable supernova, it will put on a spectacular light show for anyone who happens to be on Earth to see it. So when the star started dimming late last year, speculation rose that the show was about to start.

Because Betelgeuse is so large and so close, it's actually possible to resolve some details of its surface rather than simply seeing it as a point source of light. Some astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory to do just that, and they've found something extremely weird: Betelgeuse's dimming isn't even.

As you can see in the before-and-after images above, Betelgeuse was more or less spherical about a year ago. By December, it was most decidedly not. While the upper hemisphere of the star looked much as it had a year earlier, the lower portion looked diffuse and distorted, with at least two regions of distinct brightnesses.

What in the world could be going on here? Betelgeuse has always been a variable star (though far less variable than at present), and there are a couple of potential causes. Both are related to the star's enormous size, which means that its surface layers are only distantly and indirectly related to the fusion reactions that are taking place in its core.

Previously: Waiting for Betelgeuse: What's Up With the Tempestuous Star?

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Nuclear Fusion Power Without Regular Tokamaks Or Stellarators:

When it comes to nuclear fusion, the most well-known reactor type today is no doubt the tokamak, due to its relatively straight-forward concept of plasma containment. That's not to say that there aren't other ways to accomplish nuclear fusion in a way that could conceivably be used in a commercial power plant in the near future.

As we covered previously, another fairly well-known type of fusion reactor is the stellarator, which much like the tokamak, has been around since the 1950s. There are other reactor types from that era, like the Z-pinch, but they seem to have all fallen into obscurity. That is not to say that research on Z-pinch reactors has ceased, or that other reactor concepts — some involving massive lasers — haven't been investigated or even built since then.

In this article we'll take a look at a range of nuclear fusion reactor types that definitely deserve a bit more time in the limelight.

[...] Inertial Confinement Fusion

[...] Magnetic Confinement Fusion

[...] All the Other Designs

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Charging into the mainstream: Volvo electrifies its first class-8 truck:

The reality of a production-ready fully electric semi is now upon us, at least for the short-haul routes. Last week, Volvo Trucks revealed the VNR Electric, the centerpiece of an ambitious and highly collaborative $90-million pilot project. It's known as Low-Impact Green Heavy Transport Solution, or LIGHTS for short. In addition to Volvo, which has invested $36.7 million, 14 other entities from both the public sector and private enterprise have signed on to this collaboration.

"Bringing electric trucks commercially to market takes more than the launch of the truck," says Keith Brandis, vice president of partnerships and strategic solutions at Volvo Group. "With the LIGHTS program, Volvo and its partners are working on creating a true holistic strategy," simultaneously studying not only the performance of the truck itself, but also variables such as maintenance needs, route logistics, infrastructure requirements, and environmental impact.

"Goods movement in the region is one of the biggest contributors to smog-causing emissions and 22 percent of emissions from California's overall transport sector," says Harmeet Singh, chief technology officer at Greenlots, the company developing and deploying the charging infrastructure for the LIGHTS program.

"Our goal for the project is to demonstrate that electric trucks and the requisite charging infrastructure and systems are ready for real-world application," Singh told Ars.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Computer-based weather forecast: New algorithm outperforms mainframe computer systems:

Gerber and Horenko, along with their co-authors, have summarized their concept in an article entitled "Low-cost scalable discretization, prediction, and feature selection for complex systems" recently published in Science Advances.

"This method enables us to carry out tasks on a standard PC that previously would have required a supercomputer," emphasized Horenko. In addition to weather forecasts, the research see numerous possible applications such as in solving classification problems in bioinformatics, image analysis, and medical diagnostics.

[...] SPA or Scalable Probabilistic Approximation is a mathematically-based concept. The method could be useful in various situations that require large volumes of data to be processed automatically, such as in biology, for example, when a large number of cells need to be classified and grouped.

"What is particularly useful about the result is that we can then get an understanding of what characteristics were used to sort the cells," added Gerber. Another potential area of application is neuroscience. Automated analysis of EEG signals could form the basis for assessments of cerebral status. It could even be used in breast cancer diagnosis, as mammography images could be analyzed to predict the results of a possible biopsy.

"The SPA algorithm can be applied in a number of fields, from the Lorenz model to the molecular dynamics of amino acids in water," concluded Horenko. "The process is easier and cheaper and the results are also better compared to those produced by the current state-of-the-art supercomputers."

More Information: S. Gerber et al., Low-cost scalable discretization, prediction, and feature selection for complex systems, Science Advances 6:5, 29 January 2020, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.aaw0961

Original Submission

McGruber writes:

Television station WSB-TV 2 in Atlanta, Georgia reports Metro city sues drug manufacturer over '97,500% price increase' for seizure medicine:

The city of Marietta, Georgia is suing drug manufacturer Mallinckrodt after Mallinckrodt increased the price of the drug Acthar by 97,500%.

"Acthar used to cost $40, but Mallinckrodt has raised the price of the drug to over $39,000 per vial," the city claims in its lawsuit. "This eye-popping 97,500% price increase is the result of unlawful and unfair conduct by Mallinckrondt. The City has expended over $2 million for just one patient covered by the city's self-funded health plan."

Atlanta pharmacist Ira Katz said Acthar is what's called a "biologic" and they can be classified as specialty drugs.

"They put them into the specialty class, and the prices are outrageous, just outrageous," Katz said.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow1337:

Using noise to enhance optical sensing:

Like many researchers in the field of optics, [AMOLF physicist Said] Rodriguez works with resonant systems that can detect tiny changes in their environment. A typical optical sensor is based on a cavity, an empty space with laser light resonating between two mirrors. The resonance frequency depends on what happens in and around the cavity. "For example, a gas flowing through the cavity changes the resonance frequency, but so does a change in temperature or pressure," Rodriguez explains. "A typical detector measures this change in the resonance frequency as a change in intensity of light that comes out of the cavity. However, intensity fluctuations, i.e., noise, always disturb the measurement. The most common way to reduce the deleterious effect of noise is to average the signal over a long period of time. This limits the detection speed, while in the vast majority of applications there is great value in sensing as fast as possible. Moreover, the detection speed is always limited by noise; even if all classical (e.g. thermal) noise is suppressed, quantum noise remains."

While most optical sensors are linear—the light that comes out is a linear function of what went in—Rodriguez proposes an optical sensing scheme based on nonlinearity, which means that photons can effectively interact with each other inside the sensor. "Inside the optical cavity, we add a material that influences the resonating light in a non-linear way. The light that comes out is not a linear function of what went in, but it is bistable: for a given input, the output has two possible values," he says. "Due to inherent noise in the system, the output of the sensor flips randomly between those two values. When the resonance frequency of the cavity changes (e.g. because a particle enters the cavity) this flipping pattern changes as well."

Analyzing the statistics of the flipping pattern reveals the change in the resonance frequency. Since noise increases the flipping rate between the two values, and a greater flipping rate means less time is needed to acquire sufficient statistics, this means that noise makes the sensor faster. Rodriguez: "In conventional sensors increased noise increases the time needed to detect something entering the cavity, but in this sensor the detection is faster when there is more noise. That is really remarkable."

Reference:
Said R.K. Rodriguez. Enhancing the Speed and Sensitivity of a Nonlinear Optical Sensor with Noise, Physical Review Applied (2020). (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevApplied.13.024032)

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Iranian hackers have targeted Pulse Secure, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, and Citrix VPNs to hack into large companies.

2019 will be remembered as the year when major security bugs were disclosed in a large number of enterprise VPN servers, such as those sold by Pulse Secure, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Citrix.

A new report published today reveals that Iran's government-backed hacking units have made a top priority last year to exploit VPN bugs as soon as they became public in order to infiltrate and plant backdoors in companies all over the world.

According to a report from cyber-security firm ClearSky, Iranian hackers have targeted companies "from the IT, Telecommunication, Oil and Gas, Aviation, Government, and Security sectors."

[...] ClearSky says that "Iranian APT[*] groups have developed good technical offensive capabilities and are able to exploit 1-day vulnerabilities in relatively short periods of time."

In some instances, ClearSky says it observed Iranian groups exploiting VPN flaws within hours after the bugs been publicly disclosed.

This story is a roundup of several virus stories that were submitted over the past few days. This is a changing story, so some of what is posted below may have changed since the time of their originally being published.

What's in a name? One significant change is what the names are for everything. There is the question of what to call the actual virus and then what to call it when someone is infected.

Virus: The virus by itself is now officially referred to as SARS-CoV-2 (Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2). It was formerly known as 2019-nCoV (2019 novel coronavirus).

Disease: Those who have been infected by this virus are said to have a disease. The name of the disease is coronavirus disease (COVID-19) which is also known as 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease.

More details are available on Wikipedia.

The six submitted stories are presented below.

NIH Official Says Coronavirus 'on the Verge' of Becoming Global Pandemic Unless Containment Improves

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for carny:

NIH official says coronavirus 'on the verge' of becoming global pandemic unless containment becomes 'more successful':

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CBS's "Face The Nation" that multiple person-to-person transmissions need to occur in multiple countries in order to reach the pandemic threshold.

[...] "Technically speaking, the [World Health Organization] wouldn't be calling this a global pandemic. But it certainly is on the verge of that happening reasonably soon unless containment is more successful than it is right now," he said.

martyb writes:

New technologies, strategies expanding search for extraterrestrial life:

Emerging technologies and new strategies are opening a revitalized era in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). New discovery capabilities, along with the rapidly-expanding number of known planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, are spurring innovative approaches by both government and private organizations, according to a panel of experts speaking at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle, Washington.

New approaches will not only expand upon but also go beyond the traditional SETI technique of searching for intelligently-generated radio signals, first pioneered by Frank Drake's Project Ozma in 1960. Scientists now are designing state-of-the-art techniques to detect a variety of signatures that can indicate the possibility of extraterrestrial technologies. Such "technosignatures" can range from the chemical composition of a planet's atmosphere, to laser emissions, to structures orbiting other stars, among others.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the privately-funded SETI Institute announced an agreement to collaborate on new systems to add SETI capabilities to radio telescopes operated by NRAO. The first project will develop a system to piggyback on the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) that will provide data to a state-of-the-art technosignature search system.

"As the VLA conducts its usual scientific observations, this new system will allow for an additional and important use for the data we're already collecting," said NRAO Director Tony Beasley. "Determining whether we are alone in the Universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it," Beasley continued.

"The SETI Institute will develop and install an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky," said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute and Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. "This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search," he added.

martyb writes:

Facial expressions don't tell the whole story of emotion: Researchers warn of drawing too-quick conclusions about people's feelings:

Interacting with other people is almost always a game of reading cues and volleying back. We think a smile conveys happiness, so we offer a smile in return. We think a frown shows sadness, and maybe we attempt to cheer that person up.

Some businesses are even working on technology to determine customer satisfaction through facial expressions.

But facial expressions might not be reliable indicators of emotion, research indicates. In fact, it might be more accurate to say we should never trust a person's face, new research suggests.

"The question we really asked is: 'Can we truly detect emotion from facial articulations?'" said Aleix Martinez, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University.

"And the basic conclusion is, no, you can't."

Martinez, whose work has focused on building computer algorithms that analyze facial expressions, and his colleagues presented their findings today (Feb. 16, 2020) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle.

The researchers analyzed the kinetics of muscle movement in the human face and compared those muscle movements with a person's emotions. They found that attempts to detect or define emotions based on a person's facial expressions were almost always wrong.

"Everyone makes different facial expressions based on context and cultural background," Martinez said. "And it's important to realize that not everyone who smiles is happy. Not everyone who is happy smiles. I would even go to the extreme of saying most people who do not smile are not necessarily unhappy. And if you are happy for a whole day, you don't go walking down the street with a smile on your face. You're just happy."

Don't believe everything you see (or hear) -- while trying to not become cynical.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

2020 BX₁₂

2020 BX₁₂ is a sub-kilometer binary asteroid, classified as a near-Earth asteroid and potentially hazardous object of the Apollo group. It was discovered on 27 January 2020, by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System survey at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The asteroid was discovered during its close approach to Earth from a nominal distance of 11.5 lunar distances, or approximately 4.36 million km (2.71 million mi). After the asteroid safely passed by Earth on 3 February, radar observations of the asteroid were carried out, revealing a small natural satellite orbiting 360 m (1,180 ft) from the primary body. The discovery of the satellite was announced by the Arecibo Observatory on 10 February 2020.

[...] Radar imaging by the Arecibo Observatory show that 2020 BX₁₂ is at least 165 m (541 ft) in diameter, implying a geometric albedo of 0.30 given its absolute magnitude of 20.6. The rotation of 2020 BX₁₂ has not been fully observed in detail, thus only constraints on its rotation period can be made. From radar observations spanning two days, the maximum possible rotation period of 2020 BX₁₂ is around 2.8 hours. 2020 BX₁₂ appears to have a nearly spheroidal shape, which is commonly observed in other near-Earth objects such as 2005 YU₅₅ and 101955 Bennu.

The satellite of 2020 BX₁₂ is approximately 70 m (230 ft) in diameter, with a diameter ratio of 0.42 compared to the primary's diameter of 165 m (541 ft). The satellite is estimated to have a semi-major axis of about 360 m (1,180 ft), with an orbital period of at least 1.96 days.

Congress has required NASA to find 90% of all potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids over 140 meters in diameter by the end of 2020. Given the nature of 2020 BX₁₂'s discovery and size, that goal will not be met.

Also at ScienceAlert.

Original Submission