Science

The death toll of the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, has reached at least 81, and the virus has infected more than 2,800 people.

A map produced by researchers at Johns Hopkins University tracks and visualizes reports about the outbreak using data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organisation, China's CDC, and other sources with geographic-information-system mapping.

The big quantum buzzword these days is "quantum supremacy." (It's a term I despise, even as I acknowledge that the concept has some utility. I will explain in a moment). Unfortunately, this means that some researchers have focused on quantum supremacy as an end in itself, building useless devices to get there.

Research shows that white blood cells in the human brain are regulated by a protein called CD33–a finding with important implications in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study by the University of Alberta chemists.

“Immune cells in the brain, called microglia, play a critical role in Alzheimer’s disease,” explained Matthew Macauley, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and co-author on the paper. “They can be harmful or protective. Swaying microglia from a harmful to protective state could be the key to treating the disease.”

Phobos-Grunt, perhaps the most ambitious deep space mission ever attempted by Russia, crashed down into the ocean at the beginning of 2012. The spacecraft was supposed to land on the battered Martian moon Phobos, gather soil samples, and get them back to Earth. Instead, it ended up helplessly drifting in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for a few weeks because its onboard computer crashed just before it could fire the engines to send the spacecraft on its way to Mars.

Women have younger brains than men the same age. A study basing age on metabolism rather than birth date found an average 3.8 year difference between men and women. The discovery may help explain why women are more likely than men to stay mentally sharp in their later years.

All brains get smaller with age, and it was already known that men’s tend to shrink at a faster rate. To investigate the differences further, Manu Goyal at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis and colleagues looked at the brains of 205 men and women ranging in age from 20 to 82.

You can hack your brain to form good habits – like going to the gym and eating healthily – simply by repeating actions until they stick, according to new psychological research involving the University of Warwick..

Dr Elliot Ludvig from Warwick’s Department of Psychology, with colleagues at Princeton and Brown Universities, have created a model which shows that forming good (and bad) habits depends more on how often you perform an action than on how much satisfaction you get from it.

The new study is published in Psychological Review.

Astronomers have detected mysterious, ultra-brief repeating energy bursts from deep space for only the second time in history, and some experts suggested they could be evidence of advanced alien life.

In 1994, a mathematician at AT&T Research named Peter Shor brought instant fame to “quantum computers” when he discovered that these hypothetical devices could quickly factor large numbers — and thus break much of modern cryptography. But a fundamental problem stood in the way of actually building quantum computers: the innate frailty of their physical components.

Personal technology is getting a bad rap these days. It keeps getting more addictive: Notifications keep us glued to our phones. Autoplaying episodes lure us into Netflix binges. Social awareness cues—like the "seen-by" list on Instagram Stories—enslave us to obsessive, ouroboric usage patterns. (Blink twice if you've ever closed Instagram, only to re-open it reflexively.) Our devices, apps, and platforms, experts increasingly warn, have been engineered to capture our attention and ingrain habits that are (it seems self evident) less than healthy.

China is heading to an unknown lunar landscape. If all goes to plan, it will become the first country to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon.

The Chang’e 4 mission, which includes both a lander and a rover, is scheduled to take off today at 1830 GMT from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) is yet to announce a specific landing date.