Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 190

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".

If 2020 couldn't get any worse, the bubonic plague has reached the United States -- something that is otherwise known as black death.

It first started out in China, which unfortunately should come as no surprise, with the bubonic plague infecting people in the Inner Mongolia province. A teenager was infected with the disease, and later died. After that, a squirrel tested positive for the bubonic plague in the United States -- meaning the bubonic plague has reached the shores of the US.

China confirmed that the country had indeed had a case of the bubonic plague in the city of Bayannur, in Inner Mongolia. After he was infected with the disease, a 15-year-old boy died reports CBS News. The teenager contracted the disease from an infected marmot, according to local news agencies and health officials.

The United States is seeing a resurgence of the coronavirus, and now three major medical groups have issued at statement o the public about what they can do to battle the coronavirus.

An open letter released to the public by the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, and American Nurses Association has expressed to the public that as states began to reopen, people abandoned some of the steps taken that were made to made progress. Here's what the statement said, "But in the weeks since states began reopening, some of the steps that were critical to the progress we made were too quickly abandoned. And we are now watching in real-time as a dramatic uptick in COVID-19 cases is erasing our hard-won gains."

The statement goes onto say that the three groups are urging the American public to take the necessary and simple steps to start curbing the virus once again. "This is why as physicians, nurses, hospital and health system leaders, researchers and public health experts, we are urging the American public to take the simple steps we know will help stop the spread of the virus: wearing a face mask, maintaining physical distancing, and washing hands." The letter also touches on Dr. Fauci mentioning that if drastic change isn't made across the nation that we could see 100,000 new coronavirus cases each day if citizens don't take the correct precautions.

Over the weekend, China reported on a new disease that seems to be emerging in Inner Mongolia, and that new disease is the bubonic plague.

Yes, that's right, it isn't another case of coronavirus, or an uptick in COVID-19 cases, but instead, the bubonic plague. According to the statement on the local health commission's website, a hospital located in northern China's Inner Mongolia has a suspected case of bubonic plague.

In response to this case of the bubonic plague, Bloomberg reports a third-level warning alert has been issued this past Saturday and that the warning level will extend to the end of the year. Human-to-human transmission of the infection is completely possible, which is why the Bayannaoer health commission has publicly issued a warning for everyone to take precautions. If you are interested in finding out more information about the bubonic plague, check out this link here.

If you know anything about space, you would most likely know that the Hubble Space Telescope is one of the best instruments humans have at capturing the beauty of space.

Above is a tweet from the official Hubble Twitter account, and what is seen in the picture has to be a contender for one of the best snaps of a galaxy Hubble has ever taken. The galaxy we are looking at is named NGC 2275, and from the image we can see that this spiral galaxy has a decent amount of young stars around its outer edge.

NASA describes the galaxy as having a "feathery nature", and points out that at the center of the galaxy there virtually no star formation, indicating that the galaxy is somewhat on the younger side. This gorgeous galaxy is located 61 million light-years away from Earth, which no doubt increases the impressiveness of Hubble's image capturing capabilities. In the entirety of this article, you will find NASA's more in-depth explanation of the galaxy.

I didn't think I'd be writing this story today, but here we go. NASA developed a "space scent" over 10 years ago now, something that the US space agency gave to astronauts in training as a preview of the "unique odor" outside of our atmosphere.

But now, Eau de Space is making a very special cologne now that NASA has "declassified" the fragrance. The company said it took years of cutting through red tape and a "couple of Freedom of Information Act requests" to tweak the smell and have exclusivity rights to sell the scent of space.

But what does space smell like? International Space Station Science Officer Don Pettit explains that the smell of space comes through the airlock after astronauts finish their spacewalk, and stays on their suits and helmets.

A new announcement from NASA has revealed that the launch for the Mars 2020 rover has been delayed due to a problem with the oxygen sensor line.

If you were planning on watching the launch of the new Mars rover called Perseverance, you will, unfortunately, have to wait a little bit longer. NASA and United Launch Alliance have delayed the blast-off date, due to what has been called "processing delays in preparation for spacecraft mate operations". More specifically, a liquid oxygen sensor line produced "off-nominal data" throughout a practice testing session. The team behind the launch has said that they will need more time to evaluate what happened.

The announcement was made on the official NASA blogs website, which you can check out here. NASA has now said that the new launch window to "no earlier than July 30th." The NASA website also says that the teams have expanded the mission launch opportunities to August 15th, and are further evaluation is needed to see if the launch period needs to be extended later into August.