The US Food and Drug Administration has given a safety clearance to lab-grown meat for the first time. From a report: Upside Foods, a California-based company that makes meat from cultured chicken cells, will be able to begin selling its products once its facilities have been inspected by the US Department of Agriculture. The agency said it had evaluated the information submitted by Upside Foods and it had "no further questions at this time about the firm's safety conclusion."

"Advancements in cell culture technology are enabling food developers to use animal cells obtained from livestock, poultry, and seafood in the production of food, with these products expected to be ready for the U.S. market in the near future," Dr. Robert M. Califf, the FDA's commissioner of food and drugs and Susan T. Mayne, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), said in a statement.

A super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river is running under the ice sheet. That could be bad news for sea-level rise. From a report: For all its treacherousness and general inclination to kill you, Antarctica's icy surface is fairly tranquil: vast stretches of miles-thick whiteness, with not a plant or animal to speak of. But way below the surface, where that ice meets land, things get wild. What scientists used to think was a ho-hum subglacial environment is in fact humming with hydrological activity, recent research is revealing, with major implications for global sea-level rise. Researchers just found that, at the base of Antarctica's ice, an area the size of Germany and France combined is feeding meltwater into a super-pressurized, 290-mile-long river running to the sea. "Thirty years ago, we thought the whole of the ice pretty much was frozen to the bed," says Imperial College London glaciologist Martin Siegert, coauthor of a new paper in Nature Geoscience describing the finding. "Now we're in a position that we've just never been in before, to understand the whole of the Antarctic ice sheet."

Antarctica's ice is divided into two main components: the ice sheet that sits on land, and the ice shelf that extends off the coast, floating on seawater. Where the two meet -- where the ice lifts off the bed and starts touching the ocean -- is known as the grounding line. But the underside of all that ice is obscured. To find out what's going on below, some scientists have hiked across glaciers while dragging ground-penetrating radar units on sleds -- the pings travel through thousands of feet of ice and bounce off the underlying seawater, so the researchers can build detailed maps of what used to be hidden. Others are setting off explosions, then analyzing the seismic waves that come back to the surface to indicate whether there's land or water below. Still others are lowering torpedo-shaped robots through boreholes to get unprecedented imagery of the underside of the floating ice shelf. Up in the sky, satellites can measure minute changes in surface elevation, which indicates the features below -- a swell, for instance, might betray a subglacial lake.

The James Webb space telescope has revealed its latest image of celestial majesty, an ethereal hourglass of orange and blue dust being shot out from a newly forming star at its center. The Guardian reports: The colourful clouds are only visible in infrared light, so had never been seen before being captured by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (Nircam), Nasa and the European Space Agency said in a statement on Wednesday. The very young star, known as protostar L1527, is hidden in darkness by the edge of a rotating disk of gas at the neck of the hourglass. However, light spills out from the top and bottom of the disk, lighting up the hourglass-shaped clouds.

The clouds are created by material ejected from the star colliding with surrounding matter, the statement said. The dust is thinnest in the blue sections and thickest in the orange parts, it added. The protostar, which is just 100,000 years old and at the earliest stage of star formation, is not yet able to generate its own energy. The surrounding black disk, which is about the size of our solar system, will feed material to the protostar until it eventually reaches "the threshold for nuclear fusion to begin," the statement said. "Ultimately, this view of L1527 provides a window into what our sun and solar system looked like in their infancy," it added. The protostar is located in the Taurus molecular cloud, a stellar nursery home to hundreds of nearly formed stars around 430 light years from Earth.

Dairy cows fed industrial hemp produced milk with detectable levels of the buzz-inducing molecular compound THC, according to a new study from Germany that could influence the potential uses of hemp as an ingredient in animal feed. The dairy cows also showed behavioral changes -- yawning and salivating a lot, moving a little unsteadily on their hoofs, standing in one place for a protracted period, and having a "somnolent appearance." The Washington Post reports: The peer-reviewed study, conducted on Holstein cows in Berlin and published Monday in the journal Nature Food, is one of the first major investigations of the use of industrial hemp as a potential supplement in animal feed. For now, such use is illegal under U.S. law, which does not allow THC in the food chain. But the new research comes as hemp, which has many industrial uses, continues to emerge from an agricultural exile that dates to the "reefer madness" hysteria of the 1930s. [...]

The researchers at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment found no behavioral change in cows given the entire hemp plant, which contained very low levels of THC. Only when fed solely the portions of the hemp plant with higher THC concentrations -- including the flowers and leaves -- did the behavioral effects appear, according to the study. Those effects included slower heart rate and respiration, "pronounced tongue play, increased yawning, salivation, nasal secretion formation," and reddening of a portion of the eyes, the report states. Some animals "displayed careful, occasionally unsteady gait, unusually long standing and abnormal posture." The animals also ate less and produced less milk, according to Robert Pieper, head of the department of food chain safety for the institute and co-author of the new paper. "That is a strong effect on animal health. Not a positive effect," he said. But he did not predict how it would play out in the policy world.

Researchers have developed a fentanyl vaccine that could eliminate the drug's "high" by blocking its ability to enter the brain -- which could be a major step forward in the ongoing opioid crisis. Yahoo News reports: The study, conducted by a research team led by the University of Houston and funded by the Department of Defense through the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Disorder Research Program, was published in the journal Pharmaceutics at the end of October. Colin Haile, a research associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study, said in a news release that the vaccine "is able to generate anti-fentanyl antibodies that bind to the consumed fentanyl and prevent it from entering the brain, allowing it to be eliminated out of the body via the kidneys. "Thus, the individual will not feel the euphoric effects and can "get back on the wagon' to sobriety."

Haile added that the anti-fentanyl antibodies didn't cross-react with other opioids, meaning a vaccinated person could still be treated for pain relief with other opioids. The vaccine did not cause any adverse side effects in rats involved in lab studies, and clinical trials in humans are planned "soon," with manufacturing of clinical-grade vaccine to begin in the coming months.

A partnership with Driscoll's exemplifies a shift toward more pedestrian projects with actual commercial applications. From a report: When Deb Menicos walks a strawberry field, she doesn't just look at the berries. Menicos, who holds a Ph.D. in plant breeding from Ohio State University and works as a senior scientist at Driscoll's, will often find herself counting leaves and examining the small stalks protruding from the base of the plant. These parts, known as trusses, are important because they're where the flowers and berries grow. "We want a small plant, with compact leaves and trusses poking out -- not too long, because we don't want them to touch the dirt," she says. Developing a new berry variety at Driscoll's takes at least five years. It begins with a crop of 25,000 genetically distinct plants that grow in the company's breeding field near its headquarters in Watsonville, California. Menicos and her colleagues winnow that down first to 250 plants, then clone them and replant them, narrowing the field until they have a winner.

The goal is to make the most and tastiest berries while minimizing the cost of fertilizers, pesticides and labor. Today, determining which genetic attributes translate into the easiest plants to harvest comes down to "observations and feelings," Menicos says. "We want to have better data, more quantitative data. And that's where Mineral comes in." Mineral is another way of saying Google. The closely guarded project grew out of an effort by the company's famous innovation lab, X, to use cameras and machine learning to help farmers make better decisions. Working with Driscoll's, Mineral created large unmanned rovers -- the vehicles are a little bigger than a Smart car and are packed with sensors and cameras -- that drive up and down crop rows collecting data that tell farmers which plants are thriving and which aren't.

This is known as "phenotyping," and it's a huge challenge for farmers, says Elliott Grant, Mineral's general manager. "The price of genetic modeling went down to pretty much nothing, but you still don't know what the plant does when you engineer it," he says. "Breeders and crop researchers are still going into the fields with tape measures and notepads." [...] Besides at Driscoll's, Google is testing versions of its agricultural technology with more than a dozen other companies including Syngenta, the Chinese state-owned agricultural giant that develops seeds, insecticides and herbicides for staples such as soybeans, corn and wheat.

NASA's Artemis 1 rocket blasted off the Kennedy Space Center in the early hours of Wednesday, "lighting up the night sky and accelerating on a journey that will take an astronaut-less capsule around the moon and back," reports the New York Times. From the report: At around 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the four engines on the rocket's core stage ignited, along with two skinnier side boosters. As the countdown hit zero, clamps holding the rocket down let go, and the vehicle slipped Earth's bonds. A few minutes later, the side boosters and then the giant core stage dropped away. The rocket's upper engine then ignited to carry the Orion spacecraft, where astronauts will sit during later missions, toward orbit. Less than the two hours after launch, the upper stage will fire one last time to send Orion on a path toward the moon. On Monday, Orion will pass within 60 miles of the moon's surface. After going around the moon for a couple of weeks, Orion will head back to Earth, splashing down on Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean, about 60 miles off the coast of California.

This flight, evoking the bygone Apollo era, is a crucial test for NASA's Artemis program that aims to put astronauts, after five decades of loitering in low-Earth orbit, back on the moon. For NASA, the mission ushers in a new era of lunar exploration, one that seeks to unravel scientific mysteries in the shadows of craters in the polar regions, test technologies for dreamed-of journeys to Mars and spur private enterprise to chase new entrepreneurial frontiers farther out in the solar system. [...] The launch occurred years behind schedule, and billions of dollars over budget. The delays and cost overruns of S.L.S. and Orion highlight the shortcomings of how NASA has managed its programs. The next Artemis mission, which is to take four astronauts on a journey around the moon but not to the surface, will launch no earlier than 2024. Artemis III, in which two astronauts will land near the moon's south pole, is currently scheduled for 2025, though that date is very likely to slip further into the future. NASA posted a video of the liftoff on their Twitter. Additional updates are available @NASA_SLS.

UPDATE 7:22 UTC: NASA's Artemis 1 rocket blasted off the Kennedy Space Center in the early hours of Wednesday, "lighting up the night sky and accelerating on a journey that will take an astronaut-less capsule around the moon and back," reports the New York Times. From the report: At around 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the four engines on the rocket's core stage ignited, along with two skinnier side boosters. As the countdown hit zero, clamps holding the rocket down let go, and the vehicle slipped Earth's bonds. A few minutes later, the side boosters and then the giant core stage dropped away. The rocket's upper engine then ignited to carry the Orion spacecraft, where astronauts will sit during later missions, toward orbit. Less than the two hours after launch, the upper stage will fire one last time to send Orion on a path toward the moon. On Monday, Orion will pass within 60 miles of the moon's surface. After going around the moon for a couple of weeks, Orion will head back to Earth, splashing down on Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean, about 60 miles off the coast of California.

This flight, evoking the bygone Apollo era, is a crucial test for NASA's Artemis program that aims to put astronauts, after five decades of loitering in low-Earth orbit, back on the moon. For NASA, the mission ushers in a new era of lunar exploration, one that seeks to unravel scientific mysteries in the shadows of craters in the polar regions, test technologies for dreamed-of journeys to Mars and spur private enterprise to chase new entrepreneurial frontiers farther out in the solar system. [...] The launch occurred years behind schedule, and billions of dollars over budget. The delays and cost overruns of S.L.S. and Orion highlight the shortcomings of how NASA has managed its programs. The next Artemis mission, which is to take four astronauts on a journey around the moon but not to the surface, will launch no earlier than 2024. Artemis III, in which two astronauts will land near the moon's south pole, is currently scheduled for 2025, though that date is very likely to slip further into the future. The original story from Space.com: NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission will once again attempt to launch after all. Mission managers met on Monday (Nov. 14) to discuss the flight readiness of the Artemis 1's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft following slight damage caused by Hurricane Nicole, which was swiftly downgraded to a tropical storm after making landfall, on Thursday (Nov. 10). Despite the fact that a band of insulating caulking on Orion was damaged by high winds during the storm's landfall, Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager at NASA headquarters in Washington, said "there's no change in our plan to attempt to launch on the 16th" during a media teleconference today (Nov. 14).

"The unanimous recommendation for the team was that we were in a good position to go ahead and proceed with the launch countdown," added Jeremy Parsons, deputy manager of NASA's Exploration Ground Systems program at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. If all goes according to plan during additional preflight checks and the cryogenic fueling process on Tuesday (Nov. 15), the Artemis 1 mission will launch from Launch Pad 39B at 1:04 a.m. EST (0604 GMT) on Nov. 16. You can watch the countdown, fueling and launch of Artemis 1 live online here on Space.com courtesy of NASA.

Amazon is starting a health referral service that seeks to link patients to virtual visits with providers who treat conditions like acne, hair loss and allergies. From a report: The initiative, called Amazon Clinic, is the Seattle company's latest effort to break into health care. It already operates an online pharmacy, and is in the process of buying 1Life Healthcare, which manages clinics under the One Medical brand, for $3.49 billion.

In a blog post announcing the service on Tuesday, Amazon called the new clinic a "virtual health storefront," connecting patients to "award-winning telehealth providers." The post didn't name those partners. The offering will be initially available in 32 US states and doesn't yet accept insurance, Amazon said. Patients select their condition, choose a provider from a list, and complete an intake questionnaire. From there, they connect directly to the provider through a "message-based portal."

Two new U.S. studies show that automatic emergency braking can cut the number of rear-end automobile crashes in half, and reduce pickup truck crashes by more than 40%. From a report: The studies released Tuesday, one by a government-auto industry partnership and the other by the insurance industry, each used crash data to make the calculations. Automatic emergency braking can stop vehicles if a crash is imminent, or slow them to reduce the severity. Some automakers are moving toward a voluntary commitment by 20 companies to make the braking technology standard equipment on 95% of their light-duty models during the current model year that ends next August.

A study by The Partnership for Analytics Research in Traffic Safety compared data on auto equipment with 12 million police-reported crashes from 13 states that was collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the partnership said in a statement Tuesday. The group studied forward collision warning as well as emergency braking. The group found front-to-rear crashes were cut 49% when the striking vehicle had forward collision alert plus automatic braking, when compared with vehicles that didn't have either system. Rear crashes with injuries were cut by 53%, the study found. Vehicles with forward collision warning systems only reduced rear-end crashes by 16%, and cut rear crashes with injuries by 19%.

Waymo's latest car sensor arrays are "creating real-time weather maps to improve ride hailing services in Phoenix and San Francisco," reports Engadget. "The vehicles measure the raindrops on windows to detect the intensity of conditions like fog or rain." From the report: The technology gives Waymo a much finer-grained view of conditions than it gets from airport weather stations, radar and satellites. It can track the coastal fog as it rolls inland, or drizzle that radar would normally miss. While that's not as important in a dry locale like Phoenix, it can be vital in San Francisco and other cities where the weather can vary wildly between neighborhoods. There are a number of practical advantages to gathering this data, as you might guess. Waymo is using the info to improve its Driver AI's ability to handle rough weather, including more realistic simulations. The company also believes it can better understand the limits of its cars and set higher requirements for new self-driving systems. The tech also helps Waymo One better serve ride hailing passengers at a given time and place, and gives Waymo Via trucking customers more accurate delivery updates.

The current weather maps have their limitations. They may help in a warm city like San Francisco, where condensation and puddles are usually the greatest problems, but they won't be as useful for navigating snowy climates where merely seeing the lanes can be a challenge. There's also the question of whether or not it's ideal to have cars measure the very conditions that hamper their driving. This isn't necessarily the safest approach. Waymo describes the research in a blog post.

China just completed construction on what is now the world's largest telescope array at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The country plans to aim it at our sun as part of what one expert is calling "the golden age of solar astronomy." Popular Mechanics reports: As reported in Nature earlier today, the Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT) cost 100 million yuan ($14 million USD), and is comprised of over 300 antenna dishes situated in a 3 kilometer (1.87 miles) circumference formation. Initial testing will begin in June 2024, and will focus on an upcoming increase in solar activity over the next few years, particularly on how solar eruptions affect Earth.

"China now has instruments that can observe all levels of the sun, from its surface to the outermost atmosphere," Hui Tian, a solar physicist at Beijing's Peking University, told Nature. Compared to similar telescopic arrays, the DSRT will be more finely tuned, and thus potentially capture weaker signals from high-energy particles emitted during CME events. As the sky above us becomes increasingly -- and sometimes problematically -- crowded by satellites, developing more reliable, accurate, and detailed analysis of solar activity will be critical to further expansion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After a journey of nearly five months, taking it far beyond the Moon and back, the little CAPSTONE spacecraft has successfully entered into lunar orbit. "We received confirmation that CAPSTONE arrived in near-rectilinear halo orbit, and that is a huge, huge step for the agency," said NASA's chief of exploration systems development, Jim Free, on Sunday evening. "It just completed its first insertion burn a few minutes ago. And over the next few days they'll continue to refine its orbit, and be the first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon."

This is an important orbit for NASA, and a special one, because it is really stable, requiring just a tiny amount of propellant to hold position. At its closest point to the Moon, this roughly week-long orbit passes within 3,000 km of the lunar surface, and at other points it is 70,000 km away. NASA plans to build a small space station, called the Lunar Gateway, here later this decade. But before then, the agency is starting small. CAPSTONE is a scrappy, commercial mission that was supported financially, in part, by a $13.7 million grant from NASA. Developed by a Colorado-based company named Advanced Space, with help from Terran Orbital, the spacecraft itself is modestly sized, just a 12U cubesat with a mass of around 25 kg. It could fit comfortably inside a mini-refrigerator.

The spacecraft launched at the end of June on an Electron rocket from New Zealand. Electron is the smallest rocket to launch a payload to the Moon, and its manufacturer, Rocket Lab, stressed the capabilities of the booster and its Photon upper stage to the maximum to send CAPSTONE on its long journey to the Moon. This was Rocket Lab's first deep space mission. [...] CAPSTONE will not only serve as a pathfinder in this new orbit -- verifying the theoretical properties modeled by NASA engineers -- it will also demonstrate a new system of autonomous navigation around and near the Moon. This Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System, or CAPS, is important because there is a lack of fixed tracking assets near the Moon, especially as the cislunar environment becomes more crowded during the coming decade. The mission is planned to operate for at least six months in this orbit.

A Slashdot reader writes: First published in Jan. '21, a new publication entitled Measurement Quantization affirms the #42 is the address of our universe (Appx. AC), a distinguishing feature of our construct that ultimately answers the question to life, the universe and everything – from a physicist's point-of-view. Importantly, the International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics – is a top-tier journal indexed to NASA's Astronomical Data System (ADS), the after peer review version of arXiv.org.

With just over 500 equations, the paper resolves a comprehensive physical description of dark energy, dark matter, discrete gravity, and unification. Resolving over 30 outstanding problems in modern physics, the paper derives the physical constants from first principles, demonstrates the physical significance of Planck's units, resolves discrete versions of SR and GR, derives the equivalence principle, presents a parameter free description of early universe events, discovers a new form of length contraction not related to Einstein's relativity and identifies the discrete state of our universe – 42. Forty-two is what defines our universe from any other version of a universe. It also determines the rate of expansion and the ground state orbital of an atom, thus reducing the number of stable universes as we understand them to just a few.

So, while Douglas Adams may have just been randomly picking numbers when writing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps we also live in a universe that likes to humor itself.

The CTO of a software company argues the software industry's current trajectory "is toward increasing complexity, longer product-development times, and greater fragility of production systems" — not to mention nightmarish problems maintaining code.

"To address such issues, companies usually just throw more people at the problem: more developers, more testers, and more technicians who intervene when systems fail. Surely there must be a better way," they write in IEEE Spectrum. "I'm part of a growing group of developers who think the answer could be functional programming...." Today, we have a slew of dangerous practices that compromise the robustness and maintainability of software. Nearly all modern programming languages have some form of null references, shared global state, and functions with side effects — things that are far worse than the GOTO ever was. How can those flaws be eliminated? It turns out that the answer has been around for decades: purely functional programming languages....

Indeed, software based on pure functions is particularly well suited to modern multicore CPUs. That's because pure functions operate only on their input parameters, making it impossible to have any interactions between different functions. This allows the compiler to be optimized to produce code that runs on multiple cores efficiently and easily....

Functional programming also has a solution to Hoare's "billion-dollar mistake," null references. It addresses that problem by disallowing nulls. Instead, there is a construct usually called Maybe (or Option in some languages). A Maybe can be Nothing or Just some value. Working with Maybe s forces developers to always consider both cases. They have no choice in the matter. They must handle the Nothing case every single time they encounter a Maybe. Doing so eliminates the many bugs that null references can spawn.

Functional programming also requires that data be immutable, meaning that once you set a variable to some value, it is forever that value. Variables are more like variables in math...

Pure functional programming solves many of our industry's biggest problems by removing dangerous features from the language, making it harder for developers to shoot themselves in the foot.... I anticipate that the adoption of pure functional languages will improve the quality and robustness of the whole software industry while greatly reducing time wasted on bugs that are simply impossible to generate with functional programming. It's not magic, but sometimes it feels like that, and I'm reminded of how good I have it every time I'm forced to work with a non-functional codebase.

In 2001 Slashdot ran a story about a 5,100-year-old "ice mummy" discovered in the Alps. But now researchers are arguing that our assumptions about how weather, climate, and glacial ice conspired to preserve it were all wrong. Science magazine reports: In 1991, hikers in the Alps came across a sensational find: a human body, partially encased in ice, at the top of a mountain pass between Italy and Austria. Police called to the scene initially assumed the man had died in a mountaineering accident, but within weeks archaeologists were arguing he was actually the victim of a 5100-year-old murder.

They were right: Later dubbed Ötzi after the Ötztal Valley nearby, the man's body is the oldest known "ice mummy" on record.... But Ötzi's preservation may not be as unusual as it first seemed, archaeologists argue in a paper published today. And that could mean more bodies from the distant past are waiting to emerge as ice melts in a warming climate.

Ötzi "was such a huge surprise when he was found people thought he was a freak event," says Lars Pilø, an archaeologist working for the Oppland County Glacier Archaeological Program in Norway. But many of the original assumptions about how weather, climate, and glacial ice conspired to preserve him were wrong, Pilø; and other researchers write in the journal The Holocene. "This paper sheds new light on the interpretation of this exceptional archaeological find," says Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zürich, who was not part of the team....

"The general understanding was that Ötzi marked this beginning of a cooler period," Huss says, "as people were sure that [he] must have been within the ice without interruption since his death." But with the retreat of glaciers and ice patches around the world over the past few decades, other ancient remains have emerged, including bodies, hunting equipment, horse manure, and skis. "No one expected similar sites," says Thomas Reitmaier, an archaeologist at the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Grisons in Switzerland and a co-author of the new study. "Now, we have lots, and we find this one fits quite well with the picture of glacial archaeology we've developed."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the story.

After 908 days in orbit, the U.S. military's X-37B space plane finally touched down today in Florida, reports Space.com.

And "the Boeing-built space plane also carried a service module on the newly completed mission, a first for the U.S. Space Force's X-37B program." "With the service module added, this was the most we've ever carried to orbit on the X-37B, and we're proud to have been able to prove out this new and flexible capability for the government and its industry partners," Jim Chilton, senior vice president at Boeing Space and Launch, said in a statement today.

The X-37B resembles NASA's now-retired space shuttle but is much smaller, measuring just 29 feet (8.8 meters) from nose to tail. The space shuttle was 122 feet (37 m) long and was piloted — another key difference, as the X-37B is autonomous.

The U.S. Space Force is thought to own two X-37B vehicles, both of which were provided by Boeing. To date, the duo has flown six orbital missions, each of which is known by the signifier OTV ("Orbital Test Vehicle"):

OTV-1: Launched on April 22, 2010 and landed on Dec. 3, 2010 (duration 224 days).
OTV-2: March 5, 2011 to June 16, 2012 (468 days).
OTV-3: Dec. 11, 2012 to Oct. 17, 2014 (674 days).
OTV-4: May 20, 2015 to May 7, 2015 (718 days).
OTV-5: Sept. 7, 2017 to Oct. 27, 2019 (780 days).
OTV-6: May 17, 2020 to Nov. 12, 2022 (908 days).

"Around 20% of people who survive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after cardiac arrest may describe lucid experiences of death that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death," reports SciTechDaily.

"This is according to new research led by investigators at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and elsewhere." Long-time Slashdot reader InfiniteZero shared their report: Included in the study were 567 men and women whose hearts stopped beating while hospitalized and who received CPR between May 2017 and March 2020 in the United States and the United Kingdom.... Survivors reported having unique lucid experiences, including a perception of separation from the body and observing events without pain or distress. They also reported a meaningful evaluation of life, including of their actions, intentions, and thoughts toward others. The researchers found these experiences of death to be different from hallucinations, dreams, delusions, illusions, or CPR-induced consciousness.

Tests for hidden brain activity were also included in the research. A key finding was the discovery of spikes of brain activity, including so-called gamma, delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves up to an hour into CPR. Some of these brain waves normally occur when people are conscious and performing higher mental functions, including thinking, memory retrieval, and conscious perception. "These recalled experiences and brain wave changes may be the first signs of the so-called near-death experience, and we have captured them for the first time in a large study," says Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, the lead study investigator and an intensive care physician, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Health, as well as the organization's director of critical care and resuscitation research."Our results offer evidence that while on the brink of death and in a coma, people undergo a unique inner conscious experience, including awareness without distress...."

"These lucid experiences cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain, but rather a unique human experience that emerges on the brink of death," says Parnia. As the brain is shutting down, many of its natural braking systems are released. Known as disinhibition, this provides access to the depths of a person's consciousness, including stored memories, thoughts from early childhood to death, and other aspects of reality. While no one knows the evolutionary purpose of this phenomenon, it clearly reveals "intriguing questions about human consciousness, even at death," says Parnia.

"Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence Elizabeth Holmes to 15 years in prison," reports the Guardian, "and require the Theranos founder to pay $800m in restitution, according to court documents filed on Friday." A jury found Holmes guilty in January of four counts of investor fraud and conspiracy. Her sentencing is scheduled for 18 November, and she faces a maximum 20 years in prison. Prosecutors argued that "considering the extensiveness of Holmes's fraud", their recommended sentencing would "reflect the seriousness of the offenses, provide for just punishment for the offenses, and deter Holmes and others".

Holmes's lawyer argued in documents filed on Thursday that the ex-Theranos boss should not be sentenced to prison at all and, at most, should receive 18 months of house arrest. The court filings argued that Holmes had been made a "caricature to be mocked and vilified" by the media over the years, though she is a caring mother and friend.

"Ms Holmes is no danger to the public," Holmes's lawyer said in the court documents. "She has no criminal history, has a perfect pretrial services compliance record, and is described by the people who know her repeatedly as a gentle and loving person who tries to do the right thing."

A small clinical trial has shown that researchers can use CRISPR gene editing to alter immune cells so that they will recognize mutated proteins specific to a person's tumours. Those cells can then be safely set loose in the body to find and destroy their target. It is the first attempt to combine two hot areas in cancer research: gene editing to create personalized treatments, and engineering immune cells called T cells so as to better target tumours. From a report: The approach was tested in 16 people with solid tumours, including in the breast and colon. "It is probably the most complicated therapy ever attempted in the clinic," says study co-author Antoni Ribas, a cancer researcher and physician at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We're trying to make an army out of a patient's own T cells." The results were published in Nature and presented at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer meeting in Boston, Massachusetts on 10 November.

Ribas and his colleagues began by sequencing DNA from blood samples and tumour biopsies, to look for mutations that are found in the tumour but not in the blood. This had to be done for each person in the trial. "The mutations are different in every cancer," says Ribas. "And although there are some shared mutations, they are the minority." The researchers then used algorithms to predict which of the mutations were likely to be capable of provoking a response from T cells, a type of white blood cell that patrols the body looking for errant cells. "If [T cells] see something that looks not normal, they kill it," says Stephanie Mandl, chief scientific officer at PACT Pharma in South San Francisco, California, and a lead author on the study. "But in the patients we see in the clinic with cancer, at some point the immune system kind of lost the battle and the tumour grew." After a series of analyses to confirm their findings, validate their predictions and design proteins called T-cell receptors that are capable of recognizing the tumour mutations, the researchers took blood samples from each participant and used CRISPR genome editing to insert the receptors into their T cells.