Traced

That virus likely came from a single employee who happened to be shedding an enormous quantity of a very weird variant. The researchers would desperately like to find that person. But what if that person doesn’t want to be found? A few years ago, Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri, became obsessed with weird covid variants he was seeing in wastewater samples. The ones that caught his eye were odd in a couple of different ways: they didn’t match any of the common variants, and they didn’t circulate.…

This story originally appeared on Jalopnik.When asked how Boeing’s recent door plug incident came about, company CEO Dave Calhoun cryptically explained “a quality escape occurred.” That kind of corporate doublespeak is indicative of the problem at hand. Boeing used to have quality, but it escaped, apparently sometime around when it merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. An AI That Helps You Get a Job? | AI UnlockedFor the last three decades, the company has spent substantial amounts of money buying back its own shares to…

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are rapid flashes of radio waves from deep space that are as intense as they are mysterious.Astronomers have now managed to track down the origin of the most powerful, furthest-traveling FRB ever to reach us to a tightly-knitted group of seven galaxies, giving researchers some insight into the variety of environments that can generate such curious emissions of light.Dubbed FRB 20220610A, the burst comes from somewhere within the cluster, according to new imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope…

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.PFAS, the “forever chemicals” that have been raising health concerns across the country, are not just a problem in drinking water. As these chemicals leach out of failing septic systems and landfills and wash off airport runways and farm fields, they can end up in streams that ultimately discharge into ocean ecosystems where fish, dolphins, manatees, sharks and other marine species live.We study the…

The Great Sand Sea Desert stretches over an area of 72,000km² linking Egypt and Libya. If you find yourself in a particular part of the desert in south-east Libya and south-western parts of Egypt, you'll spot pieces of yellow glass scattered across the sandy landscape.It was first described in a scientific paper in 1933 and is known as Libyan desert glass. Mineral collectors value it for its beauty, its relative rarity – and its mystery. A pendant found in Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb contains a piece of the…

The EU Parliament agreed last week on the world’s first comprehensive set of rules to regulate the transfer of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, as it looks to crack down on money laundering and illegal transfers in the bloc. From 2024, all crypto transfers, regardless of amount, will be covered by the so-called ‘travel rule’ — information on the source of the asset and its beneficiary will have to travel with the transaction and be stored on both sides of the transfer.  The regulation requires…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Almost 40% of forest area burned by wildfire in the western United States and southwestern Canada in the last 40 years can be attributed to carbon emissions associated with the world's 88 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, according to new research that seeks to hold oil and gas companies accountable for their role in climate change.…

Almost 40% of forest area burned by wildfire in the western United States and southwestern Canada in the last 40 years can be attributed to carbon emissions associated with the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers, according to new research that seeks to hold oil and gas companies accountable for their role in climate change.In findings published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the authors concluded that the emissions generated in the extraction of fossil fuels, as well…

Astronomers have traced a repeating radio signal back to a rocky, Earth-sized exoplanet that appears to have one of the crucial factors that make a world habitable: a magnetic field.The planet is known as YZ Ceti b, and it's orbiting a small red dwarf star located around 12 light-years from Earth."The search for potentially habitable or life-bearing worlds in other solar systems depends in part on being able to determine if rocky, Earth-like exoplanets actually have magnetic fields," said Joe Pesce, the program director…

By European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases April 1, 2023Contaminated water tanks on an old cruise ship used as emergency accommodation in the Netherlands caused a large outbreak of typhoid fever in Spring 2022. 72 cases were confirmed among asylum seekers and staff, all of whom recovered after treatment. The source was traced to a corroded common wall between the freshwater and wastewater tanks, which allowed sewage containing the bacteria that cause typhoid fever to leak into the drinking water…