Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 190

It seems that we're headed into the unfortunate: a second, and probably much worse lockdown over COVID-19 infections surging in multiple states across the US.

We've seen some US cities and towns opening back up for business, just like any country would need -- but it seems that even with face masks, OCD levels of washing hands, contact tracing, and home isolation weren't enough to stem more coronavirus infections.

There's now whispers of a new "lockdown 2.0" that would happen, but these new lockdowns would be much more fierce than the first. We would see harsher "lockdown 2.0" effects where COVID-19 can spread easily: nightlife establishments (think bars, clubs, restaurants) as well as house parties and other events where lots of people are within close proximity of each other.

It was just 24 hours ago that I wrote the story about the Pentagon on UFOs, saying that they are "off-world vehicles not made on this earth" -- something so big the legendary Joe Rogan himself shared on social media and had my phone blowing up all day.

Well, sticking to the topic of UFOs -- I see a story that includes some photos snapped by NASA and its Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite of a gigantic cube-shaped alien craft (or should we refer to them as "off-world vehicles not made on this earth" coming out of the Sun.

The gigantic UFO if real, would be at least 10x the size of Earth -- as the radius of our Pale Blue Dot is just 3,958 miles which would see the radius of the UFO being an absolutely mammoth 39,580 miles.

It has been forever since UFOs have been talked about and constantly battled against being called "conspiracy theories", but there has been more and more information released in the last couple of years. Remember it was only last month that a classified briefing on UFOs left senators 'disturbed' afterwards.

But the latest news is coming from The New York Times, in an article titled 'No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon's U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public' saying that a Pentagon unit tasked with UFO sightings and their findings are out of this world. Tucker Carlson broke it down saying that the New York Times reports about "recovered UFOs" that are "off-world vehicles not made on this Earth" -- a direct quote from the New York Times, says Carlson.

Edit: I wanted to clarify it was Eric W. Davis who worked as a consultant to the Pentagon UFO program, now a defense contractor, and gave a classified briefing to the Defense Department. In this briefing, he described what he calls "off-world vehicles not made on this earth".

One of the most notorious guilty pleasure foods out there has be chocolate, and while the common opinion on chocolate is to avoid it, that might not necessarily be the best advice.

According to a study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, researchers looked at how eating chocolate influences the blood vessels supplying the heart. The researchers looked at a combined analysis of studies from the past five decades that examined the connection between chocolate consumption and coronary artery disease (the blockage of the coronary arteries).

The analysis was quite extensive and had a total of 336,289 participants who reported their chocolate consumption. What the researchers found was that eating chocolate more than once a week was associated with an 8% decreased risk of coronary artery disease.

If you have ever looked up at the Moon, you would have probably noticed the massive craters embedded in its surface.

If you have noticed that, you may have wondered what caused those craters and how long ago it happened. Every day researchers and astronomers move one step closer to understanding the age of these craters, and now Osaka University researchers have completed their work on nearly 60 lunar craters by using the lunar orbiter Kaguya.

The researchers have published a new paper in Nature Communications that details the history of the asteroid impacts on Earth and the Moon. Determining the history of asteroid impacts on Earth can be difficult as the weather erodes the evidence that would be used to date such impacts. However, the Moon doesn't experience this level of erosion, which can give astronomers a baseline for dating impacts from asteroids in the Earth-Moon system.

If you've been waiting for the first official video of Mars, you'll be waiting a while -- but we have the next best thing. Check this out:

ElderFox Documentaries worked with NASA on the 4K "video" of Mars, explaining that the US space agency made color adjustments to help the team out with identifying rock formations, and more. It doesn't look too bad at all.

Still, it's a beautiful look of Mars in the glorious 4K resolution.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just updated their guidance on some critical COVID-19 information, changing their suggestion for just how long people spend in quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19.

The CDC has updated its guidance for COVID-19, where they've made some adjustments to the symptom-based criteria. The CDC explains:

So what now? If you've just tested positive for COVID-19 then the CDC still says you need to isolate yourself for 10 days starting the day you noticed the symptoms. But the new guidelines adjust what happens after those 10 days, where you'll now need to have "at least 24 hours" pass since you last had a fever -- and have not been taking fever-reducing medications.

It has been a hard year for most Americans, and hell most human beings across the planet in all countries -- but some interesting news has flung across my desk -- or should I say screen.

University of Cincinnati graduate student Andrew Yockey has some interesting statistics to share, with Scientific American writing a story titled "Americans Increase LSD Use-and a Bleak Outlook for the World May Be to Blame". You can read the entire thing here.

Andrew Yockey, a doctoral candidate in health education at the University of Cincinnati and lead author of the paper explains: "LSD is used primarily to escape. And given that the world's on fire, people might be using it as a therapeutic mechanism. Now that COVID's hit, I'd guess that use has probably tripled".

The CDC doesn't list skin rashes, or any kind of rashes on its official COVID-19 symptoms list -- while the WHO on the other hand says that skin rashes are much less common in coronavirus patients.

We all know most of the common COVID-19 symptoms, where some people have a sudden loss of smell and taste -- but there's also fevers, coughs, diarrhea, and more. There's also others that have COVID-19 and have virtually no symptoms, or a very mild case of it -- making it near impossible to make a clinical diagnosis.

Researchers in Spain have published a new study in JAMA Dermatology, where they detail enanthem in patients. The study points to work from Italy that discovered skin rashes on COVID-19 patients, with Enanthem being a rash-like lesion that is discovered inside of a patients mouth.

The US is gripped by coronavirus right now, but it seems Dr. Anthony Fauci is confident a new breakthrough COVID-19 medicine could smash the pandemic in its tracks.

Dr. Fauci said that monoclonal antibody drugs which are capable of neutralizing and providing temporary immunity against infections, could be ready by the fall -- just months away.

It seems as though The New York Times is going full-on against anti-face mask Americans, with The New York Times publishing a very detailed coronavirus-themed US map. You can check the map out in all its detail here.

On this map, are details on spots around the United States where people are wearing masks -- and more importantly, the spots where they aren't wearing masks. Without getting into a conversation about whether you should wear a mask or not, we have experts at the CDC who have recently written a paper about just this.

The CDC write a paper titled "Absence of Apparent Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from Two Stylists After Exposure at a Hair Salon with a Universal Face Covering Policy". You can read that here.

The NFL Players Association has announced that 72 NFL players have tested positive for COVID-19, with the union confirming the coronavirus cases on its website.

But first, not every single player for the NFL has been tested -- but just 2.5% of all NFL players have been tested, and that's according to ESPN. The NFL Players Association wasn't liberal with the names of players that tested positive for COVID-19, but it did say where the clusters are happening across the US.

The NFL Players Association said that the Miami Dophin's market has the highest amount of positive COVID-19 cases, which has the Arizona Cardinals and Jacksonville Jaguars right behind it.

Moderna some very unfortunate results with its latest COVID-19 vaccine trials, with one test group seeing participants seeing "severe" symptoms and adverse reactions.

The research team reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that the vaccine "induced anti-SARS-CoV-2 immune responses in all participants". The researchers added that "no trial-limiting safety concerns were identified" -- yet most of the COVID-19 vaccine trial participants reported at least one side effect.

The report aded that Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine trial participants had "adverse events that occurred in more than half the participants included fatigue, chills, headache, myalgia, and pain at the injection site". On top of that; fever, joint pain and nausea were also reported.

Do you want the cheat codes for the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic? Wear a damn mask.

The director of the CDC has said that entire COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic could've been stopped in the first 60 days. How? If everyone just wore their masks. Robert Redfield is the Director of the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Director Redfield co-authored a new scientific editorial, where he and his co-authors underlined how effective masks were based on the very latest data.

Kentucky Fried Chicken first unveiled its partnership with Beyond Meat in August 2019, where it was making meat-free nuggets. But nearly a year on, we're now seeing KFC using 3D bioprinting technology to make "meat of the future".

The company has announced in Russia of all places, that it is making all the right moves towards it innovative concept of creating a "restaurant of the future". KFC is kicking off the development of innovative 3D bioprinting technology to make chicken meat with the 3D Bioprinting Solutions research laboratory.

What the two companies will be doing is making more environmentally friendly methods of food production, where the project between KFC and 3D Bioprinting Solutions has the sole aim of making the world's first laboratory-produced chicken nuggets.

The US has reached yet another new record with COVID-19, with a new record 77,300 new coronavirus cases across the United States in the last 24 hours.

The news is coming directly from the John Hopkins University tracker, something you can check out here, which relies on government data. The US has been breaking records every few days with massive numbers of new coronavirus cases, but today's new total of 77,300 is a new record.

The US is still the worst hit country in the world when it comes to coronavirus, with 3,576,221 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 138,358 Americans losing their life to the pandemic. Brazil is second with 2,012,151 cases but their deaths are also lower with 76,688 deaths so far.

Most people in the US are struggling right now, with the COVID-19 pandemic wrecking havoc on the entire country -- but with a new stimulus package coming from the Trump administration, will it help?

It seems that the next stimulus check, while it will be larger than the original one, will be spent mostly on bills for families and individuals to keep things afloat. According to a new survey from Money/Morning Consult, nearly half of Americans -- 42% of them -- wil use the new stimulus check to cover basic expenses like housing and food.

COVID-19 pandemic is too strong for people to be getting that money, and then running out and buying a new LG OLED TV and gaming PC -- they need their rent, mortgage, food and bills all paid for. This is getting harder and harder with some depressing amounts of unemployment numbers, which seems like it's only going to get worse in the coming months.

Are you 35 years or under? Did you know that people under the age of 35 are contracting coronavirus at a scary-fast rate? Well, now you do -- read on.

Dr. William Schaffner, is a doctor that works at the Vanderbilt University as an Infectious Disease professor, recently said: "The spectrum of symptoms continues to expand and so younger people often do come in now somewhat to our surprise without fever, and this abdominal pain seems to affect them a little bit more".

Thanks to statistics from multiple states across the US, the country has seen a large uptick in COVID-19 cases that are coming from people in their 20s and 30s. Doctors are now seeing a different range of symptoms in younger patients.

The world is pretty freaked out over coronavirus as it is, but now Dr. Anthony Fauci has come out and said that coronavirus could beat the Spanish Flu -- yeah, the pandemic that killed tens of millions in the early 1900s.

Dr. Fauci said: "If you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic where anywhere from 50 to 75 to 100 million people globally died, that was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic. I hope we don't even approach that with [COVID-19] but it does have the makings of, the possibility of approaching that in seriousness. This is a pandemic of historic proportions. I think we can't deny that fact. It's something I think that when history looks back on it, it will be comparable to what we saw in 1918".

He added: "That was influenza, this is coronavirus, that essentially thrust itself onto the human population. It had two characteristics that are the thing that make it, as I say, 'the perfect storm.' And that is a virus that jumps species, but that almost immediately has an extraordinarily, capable and efficient way of spreading from human to human. Simultaneously with having a considerable degree of morbidity and mortality".

It was back in early May of this year that the first person in the world had the trial COVID-19 vaccine, with David Rach, receiving his shot at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

He has finally talked about his experience, with WJLA reporting that Rach said: "It's exciting. It's exciting from the side of a participant and graduate student studying immunology and also exciting in the promise of a vaccine by next year and life returning to a semblance of normal".

Vaccine manufacturer Pfizer also released some data from the first phase of the COVID-19 vaccine trial, with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla saying: "That the vaccine in humans created the very robust immune responses in all individuals that received the vaccine. And those responses were also able to kill the virus. What we learned is that this vaccine can neutralize the virus".