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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Merck’s molnupiravir to be given to recently-infected COVID-19 patients twice a day, for five days.

The United Kingdom has become the first country in the world to approve a potentially game-changing COVID-19 antiviral pill jointly developed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) recommended on Thursday that the drug, molnupiravir, be used as soon as possible following a positive COVID-19 test and within five days of the onset of symptoms, citing clinical data.

This is the first oral antiviral treatment for COVID-19 to be approved, marking a boost to the fight against the pandemic, with the green light coming before potential regulatory clearance in the United States. US advisers will meet this month to vote on whether molnupiravir should be authorised.

[...] Merck’s molnupiravir has been closely watched since data last month showed it could halve the chances of dying or being hospitalised for those most at risk of developing severe COVID-19 when given early in the illness.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Intel's Alder Lake big.LITTLE CPU design, tested: It's a barn burner:

After spending several days with Intel's newest consumer CPU designs, we have some surprising news: they're faster than AMD's latest Ryzens on both single-threaded and most multithreaded benchmarks.

We suspect this will be especially surprising to some, since Intel's newest desktop CPUs feature a hybrid "big.little[sic]" design similar to those found in ARM CPUs. AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950x is a traditional 16 core, 32 thread design, with all cores being "big" high-performance types with symmetric multithreading (SMT, also known as "hyperthreading"). By contrast, the i9-12900K offers 16 cores and only 24 threads—with eight "performance" cores featuring SMT and eight lower-performance "efficiency" cores with no SMT.

As pointed out in the Ars Technica comments, the Cinebench multi-threaded benchmark saw Intel's best CPU with a less than 2.5% lead, but the caption reads "Intel trounces AMD". While the Passmark multi-threaded benchmark saw AMD's best CPU with a more than 18% lead, but the caption reads "outperform i9-12900k-but even here, by a much, much, lower margin than we're accustomed to seeing".

Also at Phoronix, AnandTech, and Tom's Hardware.

See also: More Linux Performance Benchmark Data For Alder Lake, Comparison Data Points
Intel UHD Graphics 770 / Alder Lake GT1 Linux Graphics Performance

Previously: Intel Alder Lake CPUs Launch November 4th, with Up to 8 Big and 8 Small Cores

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Bilingualism Comes Naturally to Our Brains:

The brain uses a shared mechanism for combining words from a single language and for combining words from two different languages, a team of neuroscientists has discovered. Its findings indicate that language switching is natural for those who are bilingual because the brain has a mechanism that does not detect that the language has switched, allowing for a seamless transition in comprehending more than one language at once.

"Our brains are capable of engaging in multiple languages," explains Sarah Phillips, a New York University doctoral candidate and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the journal eNeuro. "Languages may differ in what sounds they use and how they organize words to form sentences. However, all languages involve the process of combining words to express complex thoughts."

[...] An estimated 60 million in the U.S. use two or more languages, according to the U.S. Census. However, despite the widespread nature of bi- and multilingualism, domestically and globally, the neurological mechanisms used to understand and produce more than one language are not well understood.

This terrain is an intriguing one; bilinguals often mix their two languages together as they converse with one another, raising questions about how the brain functions in such exchanges.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Machine learning identifies new brain network signature of major depression: Novel signature could improve understanding of depression and its subtypes, and how to treat them:

While major depression is usually straightforward to diagnose, a better understanding of the brain networks associated with depression could improve treatment strategies. Machine-learning algorithms can be applied to data on brain activity in people with depression in order to find such associations. However, most studies have focused only on specific subtypes of depression, or they have not accounted for the differences in brain imaging protocols between healthcare institutions.

[...] The machine-learning method identified key functional connections in the imaging data that could serve as a brain network signature for major depression. Indeed, when the researchers applied that new signature to rs-fMRI data collected at different institutions from 521 other people, they achieved 70 percent accuracy in identifying which of those new people had major depressive disorder.

Journal Reference:
Ayumu Yamashita, Yuki Sakai, Takashi Yamada, et al. Generalizable brain network markers of major depressive disorder across multiple imaging sites, PLOS Biology (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000966)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

University of Adelaide built a robot spider to scan Australia's Naracoorte Caves:

In the southeast of South Australia lie the Naracoorte Caves. The national park is an UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its stalactites, stalagmites and prehistoric fossils. Recently, a group of students from the University of Adelaide built a robot to complete a 3D scan of the site. The project, called CaveX, saw the group create 15 iterations of the model you see above before they settled on a final design. They went with a robot that walks on a set of six legs out of a fear that one with treads or wheels would damage the surface of the caves. The design also allowed it to traverse uneven terrain with a variety of different gaits.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Los Angeles County sheriff doubles down on not enforcing vaccine mandate as he warns of mass exodus:

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva warned Tuesday of a possible public safety threat due to a "mass exodus" of deputies from the department and blamed the county's vaccine mandate.

Villanueva accused the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors of poor policy-making and pointed to an executive order issued by the chair of the board in August that required all county employees to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 no later than October 1.

Days after the county deadline, Villanueva said he wouldn't enforce the mandate.

"I don't want to be in a position to lose 5, 10% of my workforce overnight on a vaccine mandate," Villanueva said last month.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department employs about 16,000 people in the nation's most populous county, just over half of whom are vaccinated against Covid-19, according to the department.

On Tuesday, Villanueva said only about 42% of the department's sworn personnel have been vaccinated and 3,137 deputies are at risk of termination due to the mandate.

And, the sheriff said, many unvaccinated deputies are voluntarily leaving the department to escape the vaccination requirement.

"Had (the Board of Supervisors) not talked all this nonsense about the mandate, I probably would have gotten better results at getting my employees vaccinated over time," Villanueva said.

According to Villanueva, the department typically sees just over 500 retirements each year, but that number is up to just over 600 in the past 12 months.

Coupled with an additional 238 employees leaving the department for reasons other than retirement, Villanueva said the departures are "disrupting our ability to provide public safety services to Los Angeles County."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Babies wanted: Chinese province may offer a year of maternity leave:

A landlocked province in northwest China, in an effort to encourage couples to have children, is looking to sharply increase the duration of paid maternity leave to nearly one full year, putting it on par with some developed economies in Europe.

Shaanxi is seeking public opinion on allowing an additional half a year of maternity leave on top of the current 168 days. That would put the province in the same league as European nations like Germany or Norway.

Shaanxi is also considering doubling the length of paternity leave to 30 days for couples looking to have a third child.

China announced in May that married couples may have up to three children, after data showed a dramatic decline in births in the world's most populous country.

The decision to let families have up to three children was initially met with doubts on whether it would make much difference. There were also calls for details on what supportive measures would be included.

[...] Since then, 14 provinces including Shaanxi have either amended local family planning rules or are seeking public opinion to make amendments to laws to confer extra maternity or paternity leave.

p...] China had a fertility rate of just 1.3 children per woman in 2020, recent data showed, on par with aging societies like Japan and Italy.

As the saying goes: "You may actually be one-in-a-million. Just remember that means there are 1,446 people in China exactly like you!"

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Microsoft launches Google Wave

Microsoft is bringing back Google Wave, the doomed real-time messaging and collaboration platform Google launched in 2009 and prematurely shuttered in 2010.

Maybe we should've seen this coming. Back in 2019, Microsoft announced the Fluid Framework (not to be confused with the Fluent design system). The idea here was nothing short of trying to re-invent the nature of business documents and how developers build real-time applications. Last year, the company open-sourced Fluid and started building it into a few of its own Office applications. Today, at its Ignite conference, it's launching a whole new product built on top of Fluid: Microsoft Wave Loop.

Loop is a new app — and concept — that takes the Fluid framework, which provides developers with flexible components to mix and match in order to create real-time editing-based applications, to create a new experience for users to collaborate on documents. In many ways, that was also the promise of Google Wave — real-time collaboration plus a developer framework and protocol to bring Wave everywhere.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Astronauts grew green chile on the space station and made themselves space tacos:

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station had the pleasure of dining on space tacos last weekend: tacos topped with green chile that was actually grown in space. As part of NASA's Plant Habitat-04 investigation, scientists began growing hatch chile — a type of pepper found in New Mexico's Hatch Valley — aboard the ISS in July in an effort to understand more about "plant-microbe interactions" in space, NASA said.

Astronauts have grown other crops, such as lettuce and radishes, in space before. But peppers are more difficult to grow in space because they take a relatively long time to germinate and bear fruit, according to the NASA release.

This is the first time NASA has grown peppers in space, and astronauts finally got to taste the fruits of their labor on Friday before collecting data on the red and green peppers that were harvested.

Should you collect data on peppers before you taste them?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Probably not the most profound of results, but this Scientific Reports paper is interesting nonetheless.

Abstract
Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia ever created, is a global initiative driven by volunteer contributions. When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and mobility restrictions ensued across the globe, it was unclear whether contributions to Wikipedia would decrease in the face of the pandemic, or whether volunteers would withstand the added stress and increase their contributions to accommodate the growing readership uncovered in recent studies. We analyze 223 million edits contributed from 2018 to 2020 across twelve Wikipedia language editions and find that Wikipedia's global volunteer community responded resiliently to the pandemic, substantially increasing both productivity and the number of newcomers who joined the community. For example, contributions to the English Wikipedia increased by over 20% compared to the expectation derived from pre-pandemic data. Our work sheds light on the response of a global volunteer population to the COVID-19 crisis, providing valuable insights into the behavior of critical online communities under stress.

How much time did you volunteer to Wikipedia or any other project during the pandemic?

Journal Reference:
Thorsten Ruprechter, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Tiago Santos, et al. Volunteer contributions to Wikipedia increased during COVID-19 mobility restrictions [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-00789-3)

Original Submission

driverless writes:

Canon have just unveiled their entry for the Worst Idea in Tech competition for 2021, an AI-camera that watches you 24/7 and streams anything it thinks is interesting.

Canon Unveils its First Smart Camera set to Transform how Families Photograph :

Canon Europe today introduces the PowerShot PX, a small, smart and friendly camera, which automatically captures high-quality 11.7MP images and 60p Full HD video. Part of Canon's continued commitment to redefining imaging technology, the PowerShot PX's smart features such as automatic capture of still imagery and video are set to reimagine how families capture memories.

[...] With automatic capture and priority shooting, the PowerShot PX is an innovative addition to the home that complements photographers' existing cameras, and a shining example of Canon's technology algorithm and the forward-thinking features constantly being added to its product line-up.

Here's granddad picking his nose! Here's dad scratching his butt! Here's [use your imagination] ...

Not to mention what will happen with the inevitable vulnerabilities that get disclosed that allow any random stranger to get AI-chosen video sequences of your children.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Pushing renewable power immediately could save trillions in health costs:

The use of fossil fuels comes with a wide variety of externalized costs. The big focus tends to be on the carbon dioxide fossil fuel produces and its role in warming the climate. But fossil fuels also cause environmental damage when they're extracted, and burning them produces particulate pollution and ozone. Those substances have downstream effects on human health and agriculture. If all of these costs were included in the price of fossil fuels, then alternatives would be far more competitive.

There have been numerous attempts over the years to quantify these externalized costs. Some look at the issue from a purely economic perspective, and others look at efforts to inform policy. These efforts tend to be based on our best understanding at the time; however, as our knowledge improves, the figures can be worth revisiting. That's exactly what's been done by a team of researchers at Columbia and Duke Universities who use current climate scenarios and updated health data.

The researchers' results say that, even if you ignore the climate benefits, moving away from fossil fuels rapidly would lead to benefits that, in the US alone, can add up to trillions of dollars before the century is over.

upstart writes:

Better diabetes treatment: New insulin molecule can self-regulate blood sugar:

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and biotech firm Gubra have developed a new insulin molecule that, in the future, will ensure that diabetics receive just the right amount of insulin.

The insulin on the market today is unable to identify whether a patient with type 1 diabetes needs a small or large effect from the insulin, which lowers blood sugar.

"That is why we have developed the first step towards a kind of insulin that can self-adjust according to a patient's blood sugar level. This has tremendous potential to vastly improve the lives of people with type 1 diabetes," explains Professor Knud J. Jensen, of the University of Copenhagen's Department of Chemistry, one of the researchers behind a new study on this new insulin.

The researchers behind the study developed a type of insulin with a built-in molecular-binding that can sense how much blood sugar is in the body. As blood sugar rises, the molecule becomes more active and releases more insulin. As blood sugar drops, less is released.

"The molecule constantly releases a small amount of insulin, but varies according to need," says Knud J. Jensen, who continues:

[...] "The difficult thing with diabetes is that insulin always works the same way. It lowers blood sugar, even though that might not be what a patient requires. This is what we seek to address with our new molecule."

Journal Reference:
Karin Mannerstedt, Narendra Kumar Mishra, Ebbe Engholm, et al. An Aldehyde Responsive, Cleavable Linker for Glucose Responsive Insulins, Chemistry – A European Journal (DOI: 10.1002/chem.202004878)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hubble remains in safe mode after latest glitch - SpaceNews:

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, offline for more than a week because of an issue with its instruments, is likely to remain out of service for another week as engineers investigate the problem.

Hubble's science instruments went into a safe mode early Oct. 25 after they issued error codes indicating the loss of "synchronization messages," which provide timing information used by the instruments. The safe mode stopped scientific operations of the telescope, although the instruments themselves, and the rest of the spacecraft, are in good health.

This was not the first time a problem with synchronization messages affected Hubble. Two days earlier, instruments also issued error codes because of a loss of a specific synchronization message, NASA said in a Nov. 1 statement. Controllers reset the instruments and science operations resumed the next day.

[...] Despite these problems, astronomers remain hopeful that Hubble can remain operations through much of the decade. At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in early June, officials with the Space Telescope Science Institute said they were working on initiatives to extend the life of the telescope and its instruments to as late as 2030.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Talk-to-tilt: head tilting in dogs:

Several animals, including humans, present an asymmetry in the way they move or perceive the environment through their senses. For instance, one can prefer an ear or an eye over the other, when processing a vocal signal or an image. In dogs, these asymmetries manifest in behaviours such as tail wagging, nostril use while sniffing, or even paw preference when trying to grasp something out of their reach. Lateralization is also present in brain functioning.

“Tilting the head is yet another asymmetrical movement in dogs, but it had never been studied. We investigated the frequency and direction of this behaviour in response to a specific human verbal vocalization: when the owner asks the dog to bring a toy by saying its name. We did so after realizing that it often happened when the dogs were listening to their owners” explains Dr. Andrea Sommese, lead researcher for this study, from the Family Dog Project, at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

The researchers analysed the videos collected during a previous study which showed that not every dog could learn toy names after 3 months of intensive training. The test was fairly easy to execute: the toys were placed in one room and the owner in another, together with the experimenter. In each trial, the owner asked the dog to fetch a specific toy by saying its name.