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Researchers deliberately infect participants with SARS-CoV-2 in ‘challenge’ trials — but high levels of immunity complicate efforts to test vaccines and treatments.

When Paul Zimmer-Harwood volunteered to be intentionally infected with SARS-CoV-2, he wasn’t sure what to expect. He was ready for a repeat of his first brush with COVID-19, through a naturally acquired infection that gave him influenza-like symptoms. But he hoped his immunity would help him feel well enough to use the indoor bicycle trainer that he had brought into quarantine.

It turned out that Zimmer-Harwood, a PhD student at University of Oxford, UK, had nothing to worry about. Neither he nor any of the 35 other people who participated in the ‘challenge’ trial actually got COVID-19.

The study’s results, published on 1 May in Lancet Microbe, raise questions about the usefulness of COVID-19 challenge trials for testing vaccines, drugs and other therapeutics. “If you can’t get people infected, then you can’t test those things,” says Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. Viral strains used in challenge trials take many months to produce, making it impossible to match emerging circulating variants that can overcome high levels of existing immunity in populations.

Researchers use challenge trials to understand infections and quickly test vaccines and therapies. In March 2021, after months of ethical debate, UK researchers launched the world’s first COVID-19 challenge trial. The study2 identified a minuscule dose of the SARS-CoV-2 strain that circulated in the early days of the pandemic that could infect about half of the participants, who had not previously been infected with the virus (at that time, vaccines weren’t yet widely available).

Area around Rio de Janeiro beach filled for several blocks as singer closes her Celebration world tour

With the world-famous statue towering over it from Corcovado mountain, Rio de Janeiro is well used to Christ the Redeemer. For one night only this weekend, it also had Madonna.

More than a million people thronged Copacabana beach on Saturday night, turning its vast stretch of sand into a massive dancefloor for a free concert by the pop star as she completed her world tour.

“Here we are in the most beautiful place in the world,” Madonna, 65, told the tightly packed crowd. Pointing out the ocean view and the mountains, she added: “This place is magic.”

In the run-up to the concert, the city had been buzzing, with fans lined up outside the stately Copacabana Palace hotel in the hope of catching a glimpse of the star. The city’s airport fielded an estimated 170 extra flights as fans poured in from around the world.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that the operations of Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera will be closed in the country.

Netanyahu said in a post on X: “The government headed by me unanimously decided: the incitement channel Al Jazeera will be closed in Israel.”

Ofir Gendelman, the prime minister’s spokesperson to the Arab world, said Sunday that the decision would be “implemented immediately.”

In a post on X, Gendelman said that the network’s “broadcast equipment will be confiscated, the channel’s correspondents will be prevented from working, the channel will be removed from cable and satellite television companies, and Al Jazeera’s websites will be blocked on the Internet.

The captain of a California dive boat who jumped overboard rather than put out a fire that killed 34 people has been jailed.

Jerry Boylan was sentenced to four years for criminal negligence over his response after a fire broke out on The Conception in September 2019, killing 33 passengers and one crew trapped below deck.

It was one of the deadliest maritime disasters in the country for years and led to an overhaul of laws and congressional reform. There are several still ongoing lawsuits.

Relatives of the victims have denounced the sentence, saying he should have been jailed for the 10-year maximum allowed.

It's the first time this behavior was observed in the animal world.

Observers have documented multiple animal species using plants for self-medicinal purposes, such as great apes eating plants that treat parasitic infections or rubbing vegetation on sore muscles. But a wild orangutan recently displayed something never observed before—he treated his own open wound by activating a plant’s medical properties using his own spit. As detailed in a study published May 2 in Scientific Reports, evolutionary biologists believe the behavior could point toward a common ancestor shared with humans.

The discovery occurred within a protected Indonesian rainforest at the Suaq Balimbing research site. This region, currently home to roughly 150 critically endangered Sumatran orangutans, is utilized by an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior to monitor the apes’ behavior and wellbeing. During their daily observations, cognitive and evolutionary biologists noticed a sizable injury on the face of one of the local males named Rakus. Such wounds are unsurprising among the primates, since they frequently spar with one another—but then Rakus did something three days later that the team didn’t expect.

After picking leaves off of a native plant known as an Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria), well-known for its anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, and antioxidant properties, as well as its use in traditional malaria medicines, Rakus began to chew the plant into a paste. He then rubbed it directly on his facial injury for several minutes before covering it entirely with the mixture. Over the next few days, researchers noted the self-applied natural bandage kept the wound from showing signs of infection or exacerbation. Within five days, the injury scabbed over before healing entirely.

What happens when patients suddenly stop their medications? We study the health consequences of drug interruptions caused by large, abrupt, and arbitrary changes in price.

Medicare’s prescription drug benefit as-if-randomly assigns 65-year-olds a drug budget as a function of their birth month, beyond which out-of-pocket costs suddenly increase. Those facing smaller budgets consume fewer drugs and die more: mortality increases 0.0164 percentage points per month (13.9%) for each $100 per month budget decrease (24.4%).

This estimate is robust to a range of falsification checks, and lies in the 97.8th percentile of 544 placebo estimates from similar populations that lack the same idiosyncratic budget policy. Several facts help make sense of this large effect. First, patients stop taking drugs that are both ‘high-value,’ and suspected to cause life-threatening withdrawal syndromes when stopped. Second, using machine learning, we identify patients at the highest risk of drug-preventable adverse events.

Contrary to the predictions of standard economic models, high-risk patients (e.g., those most likely to have a heart attack) cut back more than low-risk patients on exactly those drugs that would benefit them the most (e.g., statins). Finally, patients appear unaware of these risks. In a survey of 65-year-olds, only one-third believe that stopping their drugs for up to a month could have any serious consequences.

We conclude that, far from curbing waste, cost-sharing is itself highly inefficient, resulting in missed opportunities to buy health at very low cost (⁠$11,321 per life-year).

OSAKA -- Clinical trials of the world's first "tooth regrowth medicine" are set to commence in September at Kyoto University Hospital, researchers announced here on May 2.

Once the medicine's safety is confirmed, it will be given to patients congenitally lacking a full set of teeth to confirm its effectiveness. The researchers hope to commence sale of the medicine in 2030.

Congenital tooth deficiency is believed to affect about 1% of the population. The absence of six or more teeth, a condition known as oligodontia, is believed to be hereditary, and is said to affect about 0.1% of the population.

According to Kitano Hospital in Osaka's Kita Ward, which is involved in the study, the first phase of the clinical trials will run from September this year to August 2025. The medicine will be administered intravenously to healthy individuals to confirm its effectiveness, with 30 males between the ages of 30 and 64 taking part. The subjects must be missing at least one back tooth so that there will be no problem if the medicine takes effect and a tooth begins to grow. No major side effects have been confirmed in animal studies to date.

"ONCE YOU REACH A COSMIC SCALE, TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY."

Researchers have discovered what they're calling a "cosmic glitch" in gravity, which could potentially help explain the universe's strange behavior on a cosmic scale.

As detailed in a new paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, the team from the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia in Canada posit that Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity may not be sufficient to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Einstein's "model of gravity has been essential for everything from theorizing the Big Bang to photographing black holes," said lead author and Waterloo mathematical physics graduate Robin Wen in a statement about the research. "But when we try to understand gravity on a cosmic scale, at the scale of galaxy clusters and beyond, we encounter apparent inconsistencies with the predictions of general relativity."

"It's almost as if gravity itself stops perfectly matching Einstein's theory," he added. "We are calling this inconsistency a 'cosmic glitch': gravity becomes around one percent weaker when dealing with distances in the billions of light years."

One lucky buyer had their day yesterday as the U.S. government's online auction for selling its Cheyenne supercomputer ended at $480,085. The auction, first covered by Tom's Hardware on Wednesday, has closed after 27 bidders contended for a piece of supercomputing history.

The Cheyenne supercomputer's 6-figure sale price comes with 8,064 Intel Xeon E5-2697 v4 processors with 18 cores / 36 threads at 2.3 GHz, which hover around $50 (£40) a piece on eBay. Paired with this armada of processors is 313 TB of RAM split between 4,890 64GB ECC-compliant modules, which command around $65 (£50) per stick online. For a deeper dive into Cheyenne's components and prime performance, check out our initial sale coverage. Unfortunately for buyers, none of the Cheyenne supercomputer's 32 petabytes of high-speed storage are being sold with the lot. Still, a savvy eBay seller could flip the processors and RAM across the machines for around $700,000 (£550,000), making a hefty profit.

This estimate assumes all of the CPUs and RAM sticks work, which is invalid. The auction site disclaims that "approximately 1% of nodes experienced failure [over the last six months], primarily attributed to DIMMs with ECC errors, which will remain unrepaired." This high failure rate is the reason for the sale, with upkeep made challenging by the fact that Cheyenne "is currently experiencing maintenance limitations due to faulty quick disconnects causing water spray." These two compounding issues have cost the Cheyenne team undue downtime and repair costs, leading them to look for a replacement.

I should have been enjoying the beach. I was on vacation, far from my gaming PC, and close to soothing, rolling waves. But instead, my mind kept drifting to a landlocked chunk of 14th century Germany. Few games have wormed their way into my brain like Manor Lords.

The medieval “city builder with battles,” as the developer Slavic Magic describes it, is intricate and challenging, with lots of moving pieces and interdependencies. It’s also, at times, immensely frustrating. There’s a satisfaction to that, like a multi-step puzzle box — you suss out countless tiny solutions until they all build up to the satisfying click that finally opens the lid.

But I think what’s gotten to me most about Manor Lords is not the complexity, the attention to detail, or even that satisfaction you get from planning out a city and watching it thrive. I think it’s Greg.

Manor Lords is a passion project. Greg Styczeń, who goes by Slavic Magic, has been working on its design for seven years. And there’s something funny about the entire dev team behind a successful game consisting of just this one dude named Greg.

With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of U.S. airpower. But the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence, not a human pilot. And riding in the front seat was Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.

AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028.

It was fitting that the dogfight took place at Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.

“It’s a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it,” Kendall said in an interview with The Associated Press after he landed. The AP, along with NBC, was granted permission to witness the secret flight on the condition that it would not be reported until it was complete because of operational security concerns.

A San Diego-area school district superintendent was fired this week, nearly a year after students alleged she threatened to ban them from graduation ceremonies after they inadequately applauded her daughter at a banquet.

The board that oversees the roughly 35,000-student Poway Unified School District voted unanimously to dismiss Marian Kim Phelps during a closed-door meeting on Tuesday.

In a statement read by President Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff, the board said it “has lost all confidence and trust in Dr. Phelps’ ability to continue to serve as superintendent.”

The vote followed a board-launched investigation into Phelps’ actions that began Nov. 15 and concluded April 18.

The Kyoto police department charged a man in his fifties with assault because he attacked his subordinate for telling him Oshi no Ko spoilers. The incident happened back on February 1, 2024. [Thanks, Mainichi and Manga Mogura RE!]

The assailant and the victim worked for the Kyoto District Legal Affairs Bureau. According to interviews with people who knew the both of them, the two were chatting about Oshi no Ko when the subordinate mentioned unsolicited spoilers about Oshi no Ko. The assailant then yelled, “I hate spoilers!” and then attacked the subordinate. He grabbed him by the collar and kicked him around the waist. The subordinate was not hurt in the attack. It’s unknown what part of the story the subordinate spoiled.

Oshi no Ko is a very popular anime and manga series that started serialization in April 2020. An anime series started airing in April 2023, with both the show and the opening song receiving acclaim. The story is about both the struggles of being an idol in Japan, as well as a murder mystery as to who murdered the protagonists’ favorite idol and reincarnated selves’ mother.

English translation:


Original Japanese article:

A large and popular open-source mapping database used by many companies, apps, and websites is currently dealing with a strange problem: Random, fake beaches are appearing in places like backyards, church parking lots, and golf courses. And the community knows who to blame: Pokémon Go players trying to catch a rare new creature.

On April 22, Wiglett was added to Pokémon Go. This water-type worm-like creature can only be found in and around beaches and coastal areas of the real world. So this means if you live in Kansas, as I do, then you’ll have to travel to the nearest large lake or river to catch Wiglett. Or, if those lakes and rivers near you aren’t considered beaches, then you’ll need to travel further, possibly to the East or West Coast of the United States. Well, except, that’s not the case because—using some code—I was able to see all the spawn locations in Kansas for Wiglett and it turns out I’m surrounded by beaches! Fake ones, that is.

As reported by 404 Media, Pokémon Go players are manipulating and editing the real-world map data the game uses to add more beaches in the hopes of catching a Wiglett without having to travel. Pokémon Go uses OpenStreetMaps—a free, open-source map tool that’s like Wikipedia meets Google Maps—for all its real-world data and locations. And since players have figured out the two “biomes” in which Wiglett will spawn, they can load up OpenStreetMaps and add fake beaches anywhere they want, frustrating the people who maintain the large mapping database.

Late Thursday/early Friday, it was announced that Helldivers 2 players on Steam would be required to connect to a PlayStation (PSN) account in order to continue playing the game.

The reaction from players to the news went exactly as you’d expect. As of publishing, the game has seen nearly 37,000 negative reviews on May 3 alone, according to SteamDB. It’s something that the Helldivers 2 developers at Arrowhead Game Studios are aware of, and it’s even got the attention of the studio’s CEO Jhan Pilestedt.


“Well, I guess it’s warranted. Sorry everyone for how this all transpired,” he said via Twitter. “I hope we will make it up and regain the trust by providing a continued great game experience. “I just want to make great games!”

As far as the decision behind the policy goes, the game’s community manager said on the game’s official Discord server that it was a Sony decision, not Arrowhead.

“First of all, it’s Sony’s decision, not ours,” he said. “Secondly, we don’t have all the details about region related issues yet. We’re chasing Sony to get more info.”


The new Helldivers 2 PlayStation account rules go into enforcement on May 6 for new players while current players on Steam will have to have their accounts linked by June 6.

Tesla released an update to make the Tesla Cybertruck frunk safer when it closes.

So YouTuber Jeremy Judkins tested out whether the update actually makes the frunk safer by closing the frunk on a carrot, cucumber, banana — and eventually his finger.

The recent update is supposed to better detect obstructions before the frunk finishes closing and follows a series of viral videos of the frunk slicing through carrots while closing.

The YouTuber started the video by closing the frunk on produce like a carrot, cucumber, and banana before the update was installed. The frunk chopped all of the produce when it was placed in the frunk.

"It is destroying everything," the YouTuber said.

The YouTuber then tried the same test with the update installed and was impressed with the improvement.

In a first-ever human clinical trial of four adult patients, an mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida quickly reprogrammed the immune system to attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor.

The results mirror those in 10 pet dog patients suffering from naturally occurring brain tumors whose owners approved of their participation, as they had no other treatment options, as well as results from preclinical mouse models. The breakthrough now will be tested in a Phase I pediatric clinical trial for brain cancer.

Reported May 1 in the journal Cell, the discovery represents a potential new way to recruit the immune system to fight notoriously treatment-resistant cancers using an iteration of mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles, similar to COVID-19 vaccines, but with two key differences: use of a patient's own tumor cells to create a personalized vaccine, and a newly engineered complex delivery mechanism within the vaccine.

"Instead of us injecting single particles, we're injecting clusters of particles that are wrapping around each other like onions, like a bag full of onions," said senior author Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D., a UF Health pediatric oncologist who pioneered the new vaccine, which like other immunotherapies attempts to "educate" the immune system that a tumor is foreign.

Two years ago, sodium-ion battery pioneer Natron Energy was busy preparing its specially formulated sodium batteries for mass production. The company slipped a little past its 2023 kickoff plans, but it didn't fall too far behind as far as mass battery production goes. It officially commenced production of its rapid-charging, long-life lithium-free sodium batteries this week, bringing to market an intriguing new alternative in the energy storage game.

Not only is sodium somewhere between 500 to 1,000 times more abundant than lithium on the planet we call Earth, sourcing it doesn't necessitate the same type of earth-scarring extraction. Even moving beyond the sodium vs lithium surname comparison, Natron says its sodium-ion batteries are made entirely from abundantly available commodity materials that also include aluminum, iron and manganese.

Furthermore, the materials for Natron's sodium-ion chemistry can be procured through a reliable US-based domestic supply chain free from geopolitical disruption. The same cannot be said for common lithium-ion materials like cobalt and nickel.

Sodium-ion tech has received heightened interest in recent years as a more reliable, potentially cheaper energy storage medium. While its energy density lags behind lithium-ion, advantages such as faster cycling, longer lifespan and safer, non-flammable end use have made sodium-ion an attractive alternative, especially for stationary uses like data center and EV charger backup storage.

Ecobee is discontinuing support for the very first smart thermostat. As of July 31st, 2024, the Ecobee Smart Thermostat and the Ecobee Energy Management System (EMS) thermostats will no longer be able to be controlled remotely or use any smart integrations. Basically, anything that requires an internet connection will stop working. They will still continue to control your HVAC in the same way a non-smart device does — by you controlling it on the device.

The company is offering affected users a 30 percent discount on a new Ecobee thermostat, valid for up to 15 thermostats. Customers should have received an email with the offer, but if not, Ecobee’s VP of product design, Bryan Hurren, says to contact support to get a code.

The Ecobee Smart Thermostat was the world’s first connected thermostat, launching in 2008 — a year after the first iPhone and three years before the original Nest Learning Thermostat. The EMS thermostat came in 2010 and was designed for commercial installations. Both models were discontinued in 2013 prior to the introduction of the Ecobee 3 in 2014.

Hurren says Ecobee will still support its other legacy thermostats — including the EMS SI, the Smart SI, and the Ecobee 3. Additionally, none of its existing models, such as the Ecobee3 Lite, Smart Thermostat Premium, and Smart Thermostat Enhanced, are impacted.

Since the Houston Spaceport secured the 10th FAA-Licensed commercial spaceport designation in 2015, the development's tenants have gone on to secure billions in NASA contracts. Now, the Houston Spaceport is on to its next phase of growth.

“Reflecting on its meteoric rise, the Spaceport has seen remarkable growth in a short span of time. From concepts on paper to the opening of Axiom Space, Collins Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines, the journey has been nothing short of extraordinary,” says Arturo Machuca, director of Ellington Airport and the Houston Spaceport, in a news release. “These anchor tenants, collectively holding about $5 billion in contracts with NASA and other notable aerospace companies, are not just shaping the future of space exploration but injecting vitality into Houston’s economy.”

The next phase of development, according to Houston Airports, will include:

• The construction of a taxiway to connect Ellington Airport and the Spaceport
• The construction of a roadway linking Phase 1 infrastructure to Highway 3
• The expansion of the EDGE Center, in partnership with San Jacinto College

The Houston Spaceport's first phase completed in 2019. Over the past few years, tenants delivered on their own buildouts. Last year, Intuitive Machines moved into its new $40 million headquarters and Axiom Space opened its test facility. In 2022, Collins Aerospace cut the ribbon on its new 120,000 square-foot facility.