The World Health Organization's top emergency expert said on Friday it would be "highly speculative" for the WHO to say the coronavirus did not emerge in China, where it was first identified in a food market in December last year. From a report: China is pushing a narrative via state media that the virus existed abroad before it was discovered in the central city of Wuhan, citing the presence of coronavirus on imported frozen food packaging and scientific papers claiming it had been circulating in Europe last year. "I think it's highly speculative for us to say that the disease did not emerge in China," Mike Ryan said at a virtual briefing in Geneva after being asked if COVID-19 could have first emerged outside China. "It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged," he added, saying that evidence might then lead to other places.

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Leaf-cutter ants are named for their Herculean feats: they chomp foliage and carry unwieldy pieces, like green flags many times their size, long distances to their colonies. There they chew up the leaves to feed underground fungus farms. Along the way, the insects brave all manner of predators -- and regularly engage in wars with other ants. But these insects are even tougher than previously thought. From a report: A new study shows that one Central American leaf-cutter ant species has natural armor that covers its exoskeleton. This shield-like coating is made of calcite with high levels of magnesium, a type found only in one other biological structure: sea urchin teeth, which can grind limestone. Bones and teeth of many animals contain calciferous minerals, and crustaceans, such as crabs and lobsters, have mineralized shells and other body parts. But before this finding, no type of calcite had been found in any adult insect. In leaf-cutter ants, this coating is made of thousands of tiny, plate-like crystals that harden their exoskeleton. This "armor" helps prevent the insects from losing limbs in battles with other ants and staves off fungal infections, according to a paper published November 24 in the journal Nature Communications. The discovery is especially surprising because the ants are well known. "There are thousands of papers on leaf-cutter ants," says study co-author Cameron Currie, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "We were really excited to find [this in] one of the most well-studied insects in nature," he says. Though this paper looked only at one species, Acromyrmex echinatior, Currie and colleagues suspect other related ants have the biomineral too.

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Dead mink are rising from their graves in Denmark after a rushed cull over fears of a coronavirus mutation led to thousands being slaughtered and buried in shallow pits -- from which some are now emerging. From a report: "As the bodies decay, gases can be formed," Thomas Kristensen, a national police spokesman, told the state broadcaster DR. "This causes the whole thing to expand a little. In this way, in the worst cases, the mink get pushed out of the ground." Police in West Jutland, where several thousand mink were buried in a mass grave on a military training field, have tried to counter the macabre phenomenon by shovelling extra soil on top of the corpses, which are in a 1 metre-deep trench. "This is a natural process," Kristensen said. "Unfortunately, one metre of soil is not just one metre of soil -- it depends on what type of soil it is. The problem is that the sandy soil in West Jutland is too light. So we have had to lay more soil on top." Adding to the popular concern, local media reported that the animals may also have been buried too close to lakes and underground water reserves, prompting fears of possible contamination of ground and drinking water supplies.

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This 2004 project, which is an infinite loading wallpaper, is garnering interest from users on social media this week who have found it for the first time. You might also like Zoomquilt2, from 2007, and Arkadia, from 2015.

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Iwastheone shares a report from Science Magazine: In October 2010, in a building the size of three U.S. football fields, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory powered up 192 laser beams, focused their energy into a pulse with the punch of a speeding truck, and fired it at a pellet of nuclear fuel the size of a peppercorn. So began a campaign by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to achieve the goal it is named for: igniting a fusion reaction that produces more energy than the laser puts in. A decade and nearly 3000 shots later, NIF is still generating more fizz than bang, hampered by the complex, poorly understood behavior of the laser targets when they vaporize and implode. But with new target designs and laser pulse shapes, along with better tools to monitor the miniature explosions, NIF researchers believe they are close to an important intermediate milestone known as "burning plasma": a fusion burn sustained by the heat of the reaction itself rather than the input of laser energy. Self-heating is key to burning up all the fuel and getting runaway energy gain. Once NIF reaches the threshold, simulations suggest it will have an easier path to ignition, says Mark Herrmann, who oversees Livermore's fusion program. "We're pushing as hard as we can," he says. "You can feel the acceleration in our understanding." Outsiders are impressed, too. "You kind of feel there's steady progress and less guesswork," says Steven Rose, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London. "They're moving away from designs traditionally held and trying new things." NIF may not have the luxury of time, however. The proportion of NIF shots devoted to the ignition effort has been cut from a high of nearly 60% in 2012 to less than 30% today to reserve more shots for stockpile stewardship -- experiments that simulate nuclear detonations to help verify the reliability of warheads. Presidential budget requests in recent years have repeatedly sought to slash research into inertial confinement fusion at NIF and elsewhere, only to have Congress preserve it. NIF's funder, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), is reviewing the machine's progress for the first time in 5 years. Under pressure to modernize the nuclear arsenal, the agency could decide on a further shift toward stockpile stewardship. "Will the ignition program be squeezed out?" asks Mike Dunne, who directed Livermore's fusion energy efforts from 2010 to 2014. "The jury's out."

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"Does the human brain resemble the Universe?" teases an announcement that an astrophysicist of the University of Bologna and a neurosurgeon of the University of Verona "compared the network of neuronal cells in the human brain with the cosmic network of galaxies...and surprising similarities emerged." Slashdot reader Iwastheone shares their report: Despite the substantial difference in scale between the two networks (more than 27 orders of magnitude), their quantitative analysis, which sits at the crossroads of cosmology and neurosurgery, suggests that diverse physical processes can build structures characterized by similar levels of complexity and self-organization. The human brain functions thanks to its wide neuronal network that is deemed to contain approximately 69 billion neurons. On the other hand, the observable universe can count upon a cosmic web of at least 100 billion galaxies. Within both systems, only 30% of their masses are composed of galaxies and neurons. Within both systems, galaxies and neurons arrange themselves in long filaments or nodes between the filaments. Finally, within both system, 70% of the distribution of mass or energy is composed of components playing an apparently passive role: water in the brain and dark energy in the observable Universe. Starting from the shared features of the two systems, researchers compared a simulation of the network of galaxies to sections of the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum. The goal was to observe how matter fluctuations scatter over such diverse scales. "We calculated the spectral density of both systems. This is a technique often employed in cosmology for studying the spatial distribution of galaxies", explains Franco Vazza (astrophysicist at the University of Bologna). "Our analysis showed that the distribution of the fluctuation within the cerebellum neuronal network on a scale from 1 micrometre to 0.1 millimetres follows the same progression of the distribution of matter in the cosmic web but, of course, on a larger scale that goes from 5 million to 500 million light-years". The two researchers also calculated some parameters characterising both the neuronal network and the cosmic web: the average number of connections in each node and the tendency of clustering several connections in relevant central nodes within the network. "Once again, structural parameters have identified unexpected agreement levels. Probably, the connectivity within the two networks evolves following similar physical principles, despite the striking and obvious difference between the physical powers regulating galaxies and neurons", adds Alberto Feletti (neurosurgeon at the University of Verona).

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: In 2018, a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) pulled off a dazzling materials science magic trick. They stacked two microscopic cards of graphene -- sheets of carbon one atom thick -- and twisted one ever so slightly. Applying an electric field transformed the stack from a conductor to an insulator and then, suddenly, into a superconductor: a material that frictionlessly conducts electricity. Dozens of labs leapt into the newly born field of "twistronics," hoping to conjure up novel electronic devices without the hassles of fusing together chemically different materials. Two groups -- including the pioneering MIT group -- are now delivering on that promise by turning twisted graphene into working devices, including superconducting switches like those used in many quantum computers. The studies mark a crucial step for the material, which is already maturing into a basic science tool able to capture and control individual electrons and photons. Now, it is showing that it could one day be the basis of new electronic devices.

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Iwastheone writes: While traditional diamonds are formed over billions of years deep in the Earth where extreme pressures and temperatures provide just the right conditions to crystalize carbon, scientists are working on more expedient ways of forging the precious stones. An international team of researchers has succeeded in whittling this process down to mere minutes, demonstrating a new technique where they not only form quickly, but do so at room temperature. This latest breakthrough was led by scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) and RMIT University, who used what's known as a diamond anvil cell, which is a device used by researchers to generate the extreme pressures needed to create ultra-hard materials. The team applied pressure equal to 640 African elephants on the tip of a ballet shoe, doing so in a way that caused an unexpected reaction among the the carbon atoms in the device. "The twist in the story is how we apply the pressure," says ANU Professor Jodie Bradby. "As well as very high pressures, we allow the carbon to also experience something called 'shear' -- which is like a twisting or sliding force. We think this allows the carbon atoms to move into place and form Lonsdaleite and regular diamond." These regular diamonds are the type you might find in an engagement ring, while Lonsdaleite diamonds are rarer and found at meteorite impact sites. Using advanced electron microscopy, the team was able to examine the samples in detail, and found that the materials were formed within bands they liken to "rivers" of diamond. The team hopes the technique can enable them to produce meaningful quantities of these artificial diamonds, particularly Lonsdaleite, which is predicted to be 58 percent harder than regular diamonds. "Lonsdaleite has the potential to be used for cutting through ultra-solid materials on mining sites," Bradby says. The research was published in the journal Small, while you can hear from the researchers in this video.

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The Arecibo telescope's long and productive life has come to an end. From a report: The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today it will decommission the iconic radio telescope in Puerto Rico following two cable breaks in recent months that have brought the structure to near collapse. The 57-year-old observatory, a survivor of numerous hurricanes and earthquakes, is now in such a fragile state that attempting repairs would put staff and workers in danger. "This decision was not an easy one to make," Sean Jones, NSF's assistant director for mathematical and physical sciences, said at a news briefing today. "We understand how much Arecibo means to [the research] community and to Puerto Rico." Ralph Gaume, director of NSF's astronomy division, said at the briefing the agency wants to preserve other instruments at the site, as well as the visitor and outreach center. But they are under threat if the telescope structure collapses. That would bring the 900-ton instrument platform, suspended 137 meters above the 305-meter-wide dish, crashing down. Flailing cables could damage other buildings on the site, as could the three support towers if they fell, too. "There is a serious risk of an unexpected and uncontrolled collapse," Gaume said. "A controlled decommissioning gives us the opportunity to preserve valuable assets that the observatory has." Over the next few weeks, engineering firms will develop a plan for a controlled dismantling. It may involve releasing the platform from its cables explosively and letting it fall.

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How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study -- the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination. From a report: Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come. The research, published online, has not been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal. But it is the most comprehensive and long-ranging study of immune memory to the coronavirus to date. "That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years," said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study. The findings are likely to come as a relief to experts worried that immunity to the virus might be short-lived, and that vaccines might have to be administered repeatedly to keep the pandemic under control. And the research squares with another recent finding: that survivors of SARS, caused by another coronavirus, still carry certain important immune cells 17 years after recovering. The findings are consistent with encouraging evidence emerging from other labs. Researchers at the University of Washington, led by the immunologist Marion Pepper, had earlier shown that certain "memory" cells that were produced following infection with the coronavirus persist for at least three months in the body. The study has yet to be published and peer-reviewed.

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New analysis has refuted the claim that dinosaurs were in decline at the time of their extinction. If an asteroid had not hit Earth 66m years ago, dinosaurs might have continued to dominate the planet, according to new research. From a report: A team from the University of Bath and the UK National History Museum has published a study to Royal Society Open Science saying that, contrary to some scientific thinking, dinosaurs were not in a state of decline prior to the mass extinction event. The team collected a set of different dinosaur family trees and used statistical modelling to assess if each of the main dinosaur groups was still able to produce new species at this time. Prior to the asteroid impact during the Late Cretaceous period, dinosaurs were globally widespread and were the dominant form of animal of most terrestrial ecosystems. "Previous studies done by others have used various methods to draw the conclusion that dinosaurs would have died out anyway, as they were in decline towards the end of the Cretaceous period," said first author of the study, Joe Bonsor. "However, we show that if you expand the dataset to include more recent dinosaur family trees and a broader set of dinosaur types, the results don't actually all point to this conclusion -- in fact, only about half of them do." Commenting on the new study, Richard Dawkins tweeted, "An impact as catastrophic as this will happen again. We don't know when. Using existing science, we could develop the technology to detect, intercept, and divert or destroy a large incoming asteroid. No other species could do it. It's our responsibility."

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Popular Mechanics writes: In a new study, researchers found the traditional psychoactive drug ayahuasca stimulates the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampi of research mice. The hippocampus is responsible for many memory functions, and the mice dosed with ayahuasca also performed better in a battery of memory tests. While ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic and often purgative tea brewed from leaves of a shrub that grows in South America, contains the psychoactive compound N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), it also packs harmine and tetrahydoharmine, two compounds that form new neurons from stem cells in a petri dish, per IFL Science. "The study, published in Translational Psychiatry, a Nature Research journal, reports the results of four years of in vitro and in vivo experimentation on mice..." according to one medical news site. José Ángel Morales, a researcher in the UCM and CIBERNED Department of Cellular Biology, tells them "This capacity to modulate brain plasticity suggests that it has great therapeutic potential for a wide range of psychiatric and neurological disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases." In neurodegenerative diseases, it is the death of certain types of neurons that causes the symptoms of pathologies such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Although humans have the capacity to generate new neuronal cells, this depends on several factors and is not always possible. "The challenge is to activate our dormant capacity to form neurons and thus replace the neurons that die as a result of the disease. This study shows that DMT is capable of activating neural stem cells and forming new neurons," concluded Morales.

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McDonald has announced plans to introduce its own plant-based burger option to the menu in select markets as soon as next year. From a report: The company made its plans public this week at an investor meeting. The McPlant -- the McPlant! -- uses a fake-meat amalgamation of McDonald's own creation, rather than partnering with an existing plant-based company like Impossible Foods as other chains have. (Beyond Meat and McDonalds co-created the plant-based patty .) "McPlant is crafted exclusively for McDonald's, by McDonald's," McDonald's international president Ian Borden said at this week's meeting. The reveal is a pretty drastic reversal of McDonald's public-facing strategy around plant-based options. If Borden's initial announcement is to be believed, the company doesn't just see it as a single menu option -- rather, McDonald's hopes the McPlant will prove successful enough to extend to a full plant-based menu.

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The reopening of restaurants, gyms and hotels carries the highest risk of spreading Covid-19, according to a study that used mobile phone data from 98 million people to model the risks of infection at different locations. From a report: Researchers at Stanford University and Northwestern University used data collected between March and May in cities across the U.S. to map the movement of people. They looked at where they went, how long they stayed, how many others were there and what neighborhoods they were visiting from. They then combined that information with data on the number of cases and how the virus spreads to create infection models. In Chicago, for instance, the study's model predicted that if restaurants were reopened at full capacity, they would generate almost 600,000 new infections, three times as many as with other categories. The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature, also found that about 10% of the locations examined accounted for 85% of predicted infections. This type of very granular data "shows us where there is vulnerability," said Eric Topol, of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, which wasn't involved in the study. "Then what you need to do is concentrate on the areas that light up."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers led by Osaka University and National Taiwan University created a system of nanoscale silicon resonators that can act as logic gates for light pulses. ... [The scientists] have increased the nonlinearity of silicon 100,000 times by creating a nano-optical resonator, so that all-optical switches can be operated using a continuous low-power laser. They accomplished this by fabricating tiny resonators from blocks of silicon less than 200 nm in size. Laser light with a wavelength of 592 nm can become trapped inside and rapidly heat the blocks, based on the principle of Mie resonance. "A Mie resonance occurs when the size of a nanoparticle matches a multiple of the light wavelength," author Yusuke Nagasaki says. With a nanoblock in a thermo-optically induced hot state, a second laser pulse at 543 nm can pass with almost no scattering, which is not the case when first laser is off. The block can cool with relaxation times measured in nanoseconds. This large and fast nonlinearity leads to potential applications for GHz all-optical control at the nanoscale. "Silicon is expected to remain the material of choice for optical integrated circuits and optical devices," senior author Junichi Takahara says. The current work allows for optical switches that take up much less space than previous attempts. This advance opens the way for direct on-chip integration as well as super-resolution imaging. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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A Slashdot reader writes: Denmark plans to cull its entire population of roughly 15 million minks in farms after the animals spread a mutation of the coronavirus to humans. The country's prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said at a press conference Wednesday that the mutated virus could spread to other countries and it "may pose a risk to the effectiveness of a future vaccine." "We have a great responsibility towards our own population, but with the mutation that has now been found, we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well," she said. The mutated virus was found in a dozen people who got infected by minks. Half of the 783 human Covid-19 cases in northern Denmark "are related to mink," Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said. Mike Ryan, the head of the emergencies program for the World Health Organization, has called for scientific investigations of the "complex, complex issue" of people outside of China infecting minks, which in turn transmitted the virus back to humans. Kare Molbak, a director at the research center Statens Serum Institut, said the worst-case scenario would be "a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark." "That's why we have to take this extremely seriously," Molbak said. There are between 15 million and 17 million minks in Denmark, one of the world's main mink fur exporters. According to government estimates, culling the country's mink population could cost up to $785 million. National police head Thorkild Fogde urged that 'it should happen as soon as possible."

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Many industries use heat-intensive processes that generally require the burning of fossil fuels, but a surprising green fuel alternative is emerging in the form of metal powders. Ground very fine, cheap iron powder burns readily at high temperatures, releasing energy as it oxidizes in a process that emits no carbon and produces easily collectable rust, or iron oxide, as its only emission. From a report: If burning metal powder as fuel sounds strange, the next part of the process will be even more surprising. That rust can be regenerated straight back into iron powder with the application of electricity, and if you do this using solar, wind or other zero-carbon power generation systems, you end up with a totally carbon-free cycle. The iron acts as a kind of clean battery for combustion processes, charging up via one of a number of means including electrolysis, and discharging in flames and heat. Recently, Swinkels Family Brewers in the Netherlands has become the first business in the world to put this process to work at an industrial scale. The company has been working with the Metal Power Consortium and researchers at TU Eindhoven to install a cyclical iron fuel system at its Brewery Bavaria that's capable of providing all the heat necessary for some 15 million glasses of beer a year.

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The U.S. reported 103,087 new daily coronavirus infections on Wednesday, setting a single-day record for cases, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project. From a report: This is the first time the U.S. has reported over 100,000 new cases in a single day -- a reminder of the high stakes of the election as votes continue to be tabulated. Wednesday's record comes a day after Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Ohio set their own state records as voters went to the polls. The state of play: The U.S. set its previous daily record for cases -- 97,000 -- on Oct. 30. The COVID Tracking Project recorded 1,116 new deaths and 2,802 new hospitalizations over the past 24-hour stretch.

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schwit1 writes: The coronavirus was first reported to have originated at an animal market in Wuhan, China... While an investigation into the origins of the coronavirus could help prevent future pandemics, China is not allowing the W.H.O. to conduct an independent probe of the matter, according to internal documents and interviews by the New York Times. "It was an absolute whitewash," Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Times regarding the agency's investigation. "But the answer was, that was the best they could negotiate with Xi Jinping."

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GPS isn't waterproof. The navigation system depends on radio waves, which break down rapidly in liquids, including seawater. To track undersea objects like drones or whales, researchers rely on acoustic signaling. But devices that generate and send sound usually require batteries -- bulky, short-lived batteries that need regular changing. Could we do without them? From a report: MIT researchers think so. They've built a battery-free pinpointing system dubbed Underwater Backscatter Localization (UBL). Rather than emitting its own acoustic signals, UBL reflects modulated signals from its environment. That provides researchers with positioning information, at net-zero energy. Though the technology is still developing, UBL could someday become a key tool for marine conservationists, climate scientists, and the U.S. Navy. These advances are described in a paper being presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Hot Topics in Networks workshop, by members of the Media Lab's Signal Kinetics group.

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