Nature
Scores of coronavirus vaccines are in competition — how will scientists choose the best?
Less than five months after the world first learnt about the new coronavirus causing fatal pneumonia in Wuhan, China, there are more than 90 vaccines for the virus at various stages of development, with more announced each week. At least six are already being tested for safety in people. […]
This month, the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, sketched out plans for a clinical trial that will test numerous vaccines in a single study. Some developers and funders have plans for their own efficacy trials. But key questions remain, such as which vaccines will be tested first — or at all — and how their effectiveness will be measured and compared.
“It’s going to require a level of coordination that has never really happened before, and a time frame that’s never really been even imagined,” says Mark Feinberg, president and chief executive of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) in New York City. “You can’t take 200 vaccines into efficacy trials,” says Seth Berkley, chief executive of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance in Geneva, which funds immunizations in low and middle-income countries.
Dinosaur tail reveals gigantic swimming predator
A new fossil suggests that Spinosaurus aegyptiacus was a swimming predator powered by a fin-like tail, making it potentially unique amongst non-avian dinosaurs. The find comes after decades of debate on how much of its life Spinosaurus would have spent in the water, and how reliant they might have been on aquatic prey. Paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim has been working at the dig site in the Sahara and describes his amazement at the unexpected tail bones they found under the rock and sand.
Gizmodo
Siberian Wildfires Have Burned an Area More Than Three Times the Size of Delaware
It’s spring in an era of rapid climate change so that means Russia is being lit up by monster fires. But in an era of coronavirus, a confluence of factors has made the wildfires even worse.
Russia has had a rough go of it this year. It set a record for its hottest winter ever and Moscow basically skipped the season entirely. The heat has continued into spring, and now, the Siberian countryside is on fire. Emergencies Minister Yevgeny Zinichev called it a “critical situation,” according to the Siberian Times.
Thomas Smith, a geographer at the London School of Economics, told Earther that there are roughly 5 million acres of forest and grassland ablaze in Russia. The largest fire clocks in around 1 million acres alone, or basically the size of Glacier National Park. Towns have been caught up in the fires with hundreds of structures wiped out and smoke clogging the air, making it hard to breathe. “Critical situation” might be an understatement.
No Evidence of Coronavirus Reinfection, South Korean Officials Say
Some recovered covid-19 patients who again tested positive for the coronavirus likely weren’t reinfected after all. On Thursday, South Korean officials stated that there’s no evidence currently that the virus is reinfecting people in the country, and the test results that suggested reinfection were likely false positives finding dead virus particles. […]
The wide availability of testing in South Korea has also meant that residents are tested even after they’ve seemingly recovered from the illness. A few of these patients, the country has reported, have tested positive for the virus once their symptoms had cleared and after they had been considered virus-free. These reports (which have occurred elsewhere as well) have raised the possibility that immunity to the virus may not be guaranteed and that immediate reinfection could happen. At last count, over 240 of these relapsed cases have been reported by South Korea.
But an expert committee assembled by the South Korean government said Thursday that there is little evidence for reinfection, based on their findings.
Science Alert
Exclusive: We Might Have First-Ever Detection of a Fast Radio Burst in Our Own Galaxy
A Milky Way magnetar called SGR 1935+2154 may have just massively contributed to solving the mystery of powerful deep-space radio signals that have vexed astronomers for years.
On 28 April 2020, the dead star - sitting just 30,000 light-years away - was recorded by radio observatories around the world, seemingly flaring with a single, millisecond-long burst of incredibly bright radio waves that would have been detectable from another galaxy.
In addition, global and space X-ray observatories recorded a very bright X-ray counterpart. Work on this event is very preliminary, with astronomers madly scrambling to analyse the swathes of data. But many seem in agreement that it could finally point to the source of fast radio bursts (FRBs).
"This sort of, in most people's minds, settles the origin of FRBs as coming from magnetars," astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni of Caltech, and member of one of the teams, the STARE2 survey that also detected the radio signal, told ScienceAlert.
Naked Mole Rats Just Got Weirder - When They Don't Get Enough CO2, They Have Seizures
We already know what a tough and hardy little creature the naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber) is, but it turns out these critters do have a weakness after all – they rely on high levels of carbon dioxide in their immediate environment, otherwise they have seizures.
While previous studies have already identified the animal's ability to survive without oxygen and live in CO2-heavy environments, this new research goes further, showing that the carbon dioxide is actually key to the creature's health and wellbeing.
It turns out that a genetic mutation explains this reliance on CO2, and researchers think that these findings might eventually help us find better treatments for humans who suffer from seizures and similar neurological conditions.
Science
Primatologists work to keep great apes safe from coronavirus
Seven years ago, a respiratory virus swept through the 56 chimpanzees in the Kanyawara community at Kibale National Park in Uganda, where researchers have studied chimp behavior and society for 33 years. More than 40 apes were sickened; five died. “Chimpanzees looked like limp dolls on the forest floor,” coughing and sneezing and absolutely miserable, recalls disease ecologist Tony Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It was just horrendous.”
The culprit? Rhinovirus C, a human common cold virus, which researchers found after genetically analyzing samples from a dead infant chimp. Goldberg is “100% certain” the virus came from a human—perhaps a tourist, researcher, worker, or villager.
Human respiratory viruses are already the leading cause of death in chimp communities at Kibale and at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, where Jane Goodall worked, according to a study by Goldberg and colleagues. Now, as COVID-19 spreads closer to endangered great apes in Africa and Asia, researchers and veterinarians are gearing up to protect the apes as well as local people. They are cordoning off preserves, working with local villagers and government authorities to reduce contact with apes, and wearing masks in the forest.
The Neanderthal DNA you carry may have surprisingly little impact on your looks, moods
If you think you got your freckles, red hair, or even narcolepsy from a Neanderthal in your family tree, think again. People around the world do carry traces of Neanderthals in their genomes. But a study of tens of thousands of Icelanders finds their Neanderthal legacy had little or no impact on most of their physical traits or disease risk. […]
The new study, which looked for archaic DNA in living Icelanders, challenges many of those claims. Researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark scanned the full genomes of 27,566 Icelanders in a database at deCODE Genetics in Iceland, seeking unusual archaic gene variants. The researchers ended up with a large catalog of 56,000 to 112,000 potentially archaic variants—and a few surprises.
They found, for example, that Icelanders had inherited 3.3% of their archaic DNA from Denisovans and 12.2% from unknown sources. (84.5% came from close relatives of the reference Neanderthals.)
Science Daily
How birds evolved big brains
An international team of evolutionary biologists and paleontologists have reconstructed the evolution of the avian brain using a massive dataset of brain volumes from dinosaurs, extinct birds like Archaeopteryx and the Great Auk, and modern birds.
The study, published online today in the journal Current Biology, reveals that prior to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period, birds and non-avian dinosaurs had similar relative brain sizes. After the extinction, the brain-body scaling relationship shifted dramatically as some types of birds underwent an explosive radiation to re-occupy ecological space vacated by extinct groups.
"One of the big surprises was that selection for small body size turns out to be a major factor in the evolution of large-brained birds," says Dr. Daniel Ksepka, Curator of Science at the Bruce Museum and lead author of the study. "Many successful bird families evolved proportionally large brains by shrinking down to smaller body sizes while their brain sizes stayed close to those of their larger-bodied ancestors."
Changes in snowmelt threaten farmers in western US
Farmers in parts of the western United States who rely on snowmelt to help irrigate their crops will be among the hardest hit in the world by climate change, a new study reveals.
In an article published today in Nature Climate Change, an interdisciplinary team of researchers analyzed monthly irrigation water demand together with snowmelt runoff across global basins from 1985 to 2015. The goal was to determine where irrigated agriculture has depended on snowmelt runoff in the past and how that might change with a warming climate.
They then projected changes in snowmelt and rainfall runoff if the Earth warms by 2 or 4 degrees Celsius (about 3 ½ or 7 degrees Fahrenheit), which will potentially put snow-dependent basins at risk.
Mongabay
Satellite imagery is helping to detect plastic pollution in the ocean
In 2018, Lauren Biermann was scouring a satellite image of the ocean off the coast of the Isle of May, Scotland, searching for signs of floating seaweed for a project at her university. Her eyes were drawn to lines of white dots gently curving along an ocean front.
“It was weird because I was seeing floating things that didn’t look like plants, and I didn’t know what they could be,” Biermann, an Earth observation scientist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the U.K., told Mongabay. She said she considered the fact that it could be plastic, but found it hard to believe that Scotland had patches of plastic off its coast. “I spent the first three months trying to prove that it wasn’t plastic, so I went and made a library of all of the things floating, like foam and driftwood.”
During her investigation, Biermann came across a project conducted by the University of the Aegean in Greece, in which a team of academic staff and students used drone and satellite image technology to identify “plastic targets,” such as water bottles, plastic bags and fishing nets, on the sea surface. This data helped Biermann connect the dots in her own research.
Climate change makes some fish smaller, and others bigger, study finds
Climate change is doing something unusual to the fish in our oceans: As water temperatures rise, this causes fish to morph in size. Some shrink, but others grow.
In a new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers analyzed data from more than 10 million visual survey records to understand the phenomenon of fish shrinking and growing in response to climate change, and to consider the effects on the marine environment and the management of fisheries.
Similar studies have tended to look at species that are commercially fished, mainly because there’s plenty of data on them. This investigation, however, looks at a wide range of fish living in the waters all around Australia.
CNN
This was the most dangerous place in our planet's history
The world feels like a scary place these days, but a recently published paleontology study helps put things in perspective.
A review of 100 years of fossil evidence reveals that 100 million years ago a portion of the Sahara Desert was arguably the most dangerous place on the planet, with a concentration of large predatory dinosaurs unmatched in any comparable modern terrestrial ecosystem.
The analysis of fossils from the so-called Kem Kem beds -- rock formations in south eastern Morocco, near the Algerian border, dating back to the Cretaceous period -- shows the presence in the area of large scale carnivorous dinosaurs, flying predatory reptiles, and crocodile-like hunters, all living together in what was at the time a river system full of very large fish, rather than a desert.
Ocean warming is causing massive ice sheet loss in Greenland and Antarctica, NASA study shows
The Earth is losing ice at a record speed chiefly due to warming from the ocean caused by climate change.
A
new study by NASA shows that Antarctica and Greenland's ice sheets lost 118 gigatons and 200 gigatons of ice on average per year. That would fill more than 127 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.
According to NASA, the amount of ice lost could cover New York's
Central Park in ice more than 1,000 feet thick, reaching higher than the Chrysler Building.
This loss of ice has caused the sea level to rise by about half an inch between 2003 and 2019. That's slightly less than a third of the total amount of sea level rise observed in the world's oceans, according to the study.
Researchers establish new timeline for ancient magnetic field on Mars
Mars had a global magnetic field much earlier—and much later—in the planet's history than scientists have previously known.
A planet's global magnetic field arises from what scientists call a dynamo: a flow of molten metal within the planet's core that produces an electrical current. On Earth, the dynamo is what makes compass needles point north. But Mars' dynamo has been extinct for billions of years.
New findings from UBC researchers working with colleagues in the U.S. and France, published today in Science Advances, bring us closer to knowing the precise timing and duration of Mars' dynamo.
Ocean acidification prediction now possible years in advance
CU Boulder researchers have developed a method that could enable scientists to accurately forecast ocean acidity up to five years in advance. This would enable fisheries and communities that depend on seafood negatively affected by ocean acidification to adapt to changing conditions in real time, improving economic and food security in the next few decades.
Previous studies have shown the ability to predict ocean acidity a few months out, but this is the first study to prove it is possible to predict variability in ocean acidity multiple years in advance. The new method, described in Nature Communications, offers potential to forecast the acceleration or slowdown of ocean acidification.
"We've taken a climate model and run it like you would have a weather forecast, essentially—and the model included ocean chemistry, which is extremely novel," said Riley Brady, lead author of the study, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.
Space.org
Drop in fossil fuel emissions from coronavirus response is changing Earth's air, NASA satellites show
Fossil fuel emissions are dropping as a result of changing human behaviors in response to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, NASA satellites continue to show.
NASA can see the effects of pollutants like fossil fuels from space. The agency has a host of Earth-orbiting satellites, computer-based models and datasets and sensors located on our planet's surface that continuously monitor the environment, allowing scientists to observe the growing effects of this pandemic. The agency has also started up brand new projects to specifically track and study how COVID-19 is affecting our planet's environment and atmosphere.
"The world's response to the pandemic is an unintended experiment that is giving us a chance to test our understanding of various air pollution emission sources," Barry Lefer, NASA's program scientist for tropospheric composition at NASA HQ, said in a statement.
What happened before the Big Bang?*
In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today.
Or at least, that's what we've been told by physicists for the past several decades.
But new theoretical physics research has recently revealed a possible window into the very early universe, showing that it may not be "very early" after all. Instead it may be just the latest iteration of a bang-bounce cycle that has been going on for … well, at least once, and possibly forever.
Of course, before physicists decide to toss out the Big Bang in favor of a bang-bounce cycle, these theoretical predictions will need to survive an onslaught of observation tests.
* Editor’s note: foreplay.
The New York Times
Judge Vacates Oil and Gas Leases on 145,000 Acres in Montana
A federal judge on Friday vacated 287 oil and gas leases on almost 150,000 acres of land in Montana, ruling that the Trump administration had improperly issued the leases to energy companies in 2017 and 2018.
The judge, Brian Morris of the United States District Court for the District of Montana, said the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management failed to adequately take into account the environmental impacts of the drilling. In particular, Judge Morris found that the officials had not accounted for the drilling’s impact on regional water supplies and the global impact that the increased drilling would have on climate change.
The decision is at least the third such legal loss that criticized the Trump administration for failing to consider the cumulative impacts of expanding fossil fuel production on the warming of the planet.
Hurricanes Are Reshaping Evolution Across the Caribbean
Two years ago, Colin Donihue, a biologist, released a sober scientific paper along with a series of endlessly GIF-able videos. They showed Caribbean anole lizards flailing in the wind from a leaf blower, holding on to a stick for dear life, not unlike the kitten in the classic “Hang In There, Baby” poster.
No anoles were harmed. But by proving how a lizard would try to grit its way through hurricane-force winds with sheer grip strength, those whimsical experiments led Dr. Donihue, now at Washington University in St. Louis, and a team of other researchers to a profound suggestion: Extreme weather events may bend the evolutionary course of hundreds of species. A paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers deeper evidence of their earlier finding.
Across Central and South America and the Caribbean islands, scientists found that lizards with larger toe pads seem to be more common in areas that have been hit by storm after storm in the last 70 years. That suggests that severe but fleeting cataclysms don’t just leave lasting scars on people and places. They also reshape entire species.
The Guardian
Scientists create glowing plants using mushroom genes
Emitting an eerie green glow, they look like foliage from a retro computer game, but in fact they are light-emitting plants produced in a laboratory.
Researchers say the glowing greenery could not only add an unusual dimension to home decor but also open up a fresh way for scientists to explore the inner workings of plants.
“In the future this technology can be used to visualise activities of different hormones inside the plants over the lifetime of the plant in different tissues, absolutely non-invasively. It can also be used to monitor plant responses to various stresses and changes in the environment, such as drought or wounding by herbivores,” said Dr Karen Sarkisyan, the CEO of Planta, the startup that led the work, and a researcher at Imperial College London.
Alarm over deaths of bees from rapidly spreading viral disease
A viral disease that causes honey bees to suffer severe trembling, flightlessness and death within a week is spreading exponentially in Britain.
Chronic bee paralysis virus (CBPV) was only recorded in Lincolnshire in 2007. A decade later, it was found in 39 of 47 English counties and six of eight Welsh counties, according to data collected from visits to more than 24,000 beekeepers.
As well as struggling to fly, the afflicted bees develop shiny, hairless abdomens. Piles of dead individuals are found outside hives with whole colonies frequently wiped out by the disease.
Vox
Why some labs work on making viruses deadlier — and why they should stop
Earlier this week, Newsweek and the Washington Post reported that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab near the site of the first coronavirus cases in the world, had been studying bat coronaviruses.
The Newsweek report revealed an alarming tidbit: The Wuhan lab at the center of the controversy had for years been engaged in gain-of-function research. What exactly is it? It’s a line of research where scientists take viruses and study how they might be modified to become deadlier or more transmissible. Why would they do this? Scientists who engage in such research say it helps them figure out which viruses threaten people so they can design countermeasures.
To be clear, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is definitely not a biologically engineered pathogen. It was not released on purpose, and it is likely to have been the result of accidental transmission through human contact with wild animals, like almost all disease outbreaks in history have been.
Imagine Hurricane Katrina during a pandemic. The US needs to prepare for that — now.
Without proper planning, the threat of hurricanes combined with Covid-19 is a recipe for disaster.
Think about how, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, around 20,000 people took refuge in the Superdome stadium. By their very nature, hurricanes force people to gather close together in shelters, at treatment locations, and during evacuations — at much higher numbers and densities than the CDC recommends for countering a Covid-19 outbreak. And vulnerable populations such as residents of senior care facilities and individuals with disabilities are particularly affected by both hurricanes and infectious diseases.
The Atlantic hurricane season starts on June 1, and every state and territory on the Atlantic coast is vulnerable. This year’s hurricane season is predicted to be more active than normal, with a higher likelihood of a major hurricane touching down on the US coastline. Given indications that the Covid-19 outbreak will continue into the hurricane season, this situation requires a new kind of planning from both emergency managers and the public. And that planning needs to happen now.
Ars Technica
It seems like humans really are going to launch into orbit from America again
Officials from NASA and SpaceX spoke at a series of briefings on Friday to preview the upcoming flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the discussions was, after nine years since the space shuttle's retirement, how very close astronauts really are to launching from Florida again into orbit. So far, everything remains on track for a May 27 launch to the International Space Station on a Falcon 9 rocket.
As the briefings were taking place, in fact, SpaceX conducted its 27th and final test of Crew Dragon's Mark 3 parachute system. This successful test essentially closes out the last major technical hurdle standing between the spacecraft and launch.
NIH abruptly cuts coronavirus research funding, alarming scientists
Researchers expressed alarm this week after the National Institutes of Health abruptly cancelled funding for a long-standing research project by US and Chinese scientists to examine how coronaviruses leap from bats to humans, potentially causing devastating pandemics—such as the one we are currently experiencing by a coronavirus genetically linked to those found in bats.
The funding cut could set back critical research into preventing such disease spread, scientists say. They also expressed dismay that the decision was prompted by unfounded conspiracy theories and what some see as a wider attempt by the Trump administration to deflect criticism of its handling of the pandemic by blaming China for unleashing the disease.
The NIH has not provided a clear explanation for its move to cancel the funds, which occurred April 24 and was first reported by Politico Monday, April 27. However, in emails exchanges published April 30 by Science magazine, it is clear that the NIH was motivated by conspiracy theories that allege—without evidence—that the virus was somehow released by Chinese researchers in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the pandemic began.