Lifeboat Foundation

“Construction worker” cells can build synthetic structures in the body, scientists report.

On Thursday, March 18, Austin-based Everlywell announced that it will begin selling home tests for COVID-19 beginning Monday, March 23. The business already offers dozens of at-home testing kits for anything from cholesterol levels to fertility to food sensitivities, but it is the first U.S. company to announce an at-home COVID-19 test. Everlywell has an initial supply of 30,000 COVID-19 tests and is working with multiple laboratories to scale that number to 250,000 tests weekly.

The test can be requested online for people experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. To access a test, consumers can go to everlywell.com and complete a screening questionnaire. According to the website, the test is shipped to customers with everything needed to collect a sample at home and safely ship that sample to a CLIA-certified lab partner. (All of Everywell’s laboratory partners conducting COVID-19 testing are complying with the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for COVID-19 symptoms.) The samples will then be shipped to partner labs overnight, and secure digital results will be available online within 48 hours of the lab receiving the sample. Free telehealth consultations with an independent, board-certified physician will also be available to those with positive results. The test is $135, at no profit to Everlywell, and is covered by participating HSA and FSA providers. The brand has reached out to government officials to see if the test can be made available for free.

People around the world are currently isolating themselves or in a formal quarantine to prevent the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. But for decades, astronauts have been quarantined to ensure that they were virus-free and ready to fly (or, in the case of Apollo, to make sure they didn’t bring home any “moon bugs.”)

This quarantine period “ensures that they aren’t sick or incubating an illness when they get to the space station,” NASA spokesperson Brandi Dean told Space.com.

New C.D.C. data shows that nearly 40 percent of patients sick enough to be hospitalized were age 20 to 54. But the risk of dying was significantly higher in older people.

COVID-19 has killed at least 140 people in the U.S.

This could used to emp laser missiles or other targets.

The electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) generated during the interaction of a focused 1.315-μm sub-nanosecond laser pulse with a solid hydrogen ribbon were measured. The strength and temporal characteristics of EMPs were found to be dependent on the target density. If a low density target is ionized during the interaction with the laser, and the plasma does not physically touch the target holder, the EMP is weaker in strength and shorter in time duration. It is shown that during the H₂ target experiment, the EMP does not strongly affect the response of fast electronic devices. The measurements of the EMP were carried out by Rohde&Schwarz B-Probes, particularly sensitive in the frequency range from 30 MHz and 1 GHz. Numerical simulations of resonant frequencies of the target chamber used in the experiment at the Prague Asterix Laser System kJ-class laser facility elucidate the peaked structure of EMP frequency spectra in the GHz domain.

Need to reduce high-pitched noises? Science may have an answer.

In a new study, theoretical physicists report that materials made from tapered chains of spherical beads could help dampen sounds that lie at the upper range of human hearing or just beyond.

The impacts of such noises on health are uncertain. But some research suggests that effects could include nausea, headaches, dizziness, impaired hearing or other symptoms.

While getting shots or blood work isn’t anyone’s idea of fun, roughly 10 to 20 percent of American adults suffer from trypanophobia, the extreme fear of hypodermic needles and injections. This phobia can prevent people from partaking in routine medical exams, receiving life-saving vaccines or even properly managing their blood-glucose levels (should they suffer from diabetes). However, a pair of novel injection systems offers the promise of putting those critical medicines into our bodies without ever breaking the skin.

In a preprint paper, Microsoft researchers describe a machine learning system that reasons out the correct actions to take directly from camera images. It’s trained via simulation and learns to independently navigate environments and conditions in the real world, including unseen situations, which makes it a fit for robots deployed in search and rescue missions. Someday, it could help those robots more quickly identify people in need of help.

“We wanted to push current technology to get closer to a human’s ability to interpret environmental cues, adapt to difficult conditions and operate autonomously,” wrote the researchers in a blog post published this week. “We were interested in exploring the question of what it would take to build autonomous systems that achieve similar performance levels.”