WHO Guideline Development Group: Currently no evidence that it improves survival and other important measures. The antiviral drug remdesivir is not suggested for patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19, regardless of how severely ill they are, because there is currently no evidence that it improves survival or the need for ventilation, say a WHO Guideline Development Group (GDG) panel of international experts in The BMJ today. The recommendation is part of a living guideline, developed by the World Health Organization with the methodological support of MAGIC Evidence Ecosystem Foundation, to provide trustworthy guidance on the management of covid-19 and help doctors make better decisions with their patients....

Mars once ran red with rivers. The telltale tracks of past rivers, streams, and lakes are still visible today all over the planet. But about three billion years ago, they all dried up—and no one knows why. “People have put forward different ideas, but we’re not sure what caused the climate to change so dramatically,” said University of Chicago geophysical scientist Edwin Kite. “We’d really like to understand, especially because it’s the only planet we definitely know changed from habitable to uninhabitable....

A Columbia University study in fruit flies has identified serotonin as a chemical that triggers the body’s startle response, the automatic deer-in-the-headlights reflex that freezes the body momentarily in response to a potential threat. Today’s study reveals that when a fly experiences an unexpected change to its surroundings, such as a sudden vibration, the release of serotonin helps to literally — and temporarily — stop the fly in its tracks....

A video showing a synthetic mouse embryo model on day 8 of its development; it has a beating heart, a yolk sac, a placenta, and emerging blood circulation. “The embryo is the best organ-making machine and the best 3D bioprinter – we tried to emulate what it does,” says Prof. Jacob Hanna of Weizmann’s Molecular Genetics Department, who headed the research team. Hanna explains that scientists already know how to restore mature cells to “stemness....

On the western edge of the Sahara Desert, a 61-mile-long white line cuts across the sand. This conspicuous line is the world’s longest conveyor belt system, which traverses Western Sahara’s desert from the Bou Craa phosphate mine to the coastal town of El Marsa near Laayoune. The conveyor belt helps transport a critical mineral from remote parts of northern Africa to farmlands across the world, including in the United States....

Scientists in Canada have named a newly found horned dinosaur (ceratopsian) and it’s called Xenoceratops foremostensis. It was identified from fossils originally collected in 1958 in Alberta. The researchers published their findings in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. The dinosaur was about 20 feet in length and weighed more than 2 tons. It’s the oldest known large-bodied ceratopsian from Canada. 80 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period, cerotopsian dinosaurs in North America underwent an evolutionary explosion, states Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History and lead author....

A new study found that people given accurate statistics on a controversial issue tended to misremember those numbers to fit commonly held beliefs. For example, when people are shown that the number of Mexican immigrants in the United States declined recently — which is true but goes against many people’s beliefs — they tend to remember the opposite. And when people pass along this misinformation they created, the numbers can get further and further from the truth....

The research, headed by Essam Heggy of the USC Viterbi Innovation Fund Arid Climates and Water Research Center, was in the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal Earth’s Future. The impact of the pollution is especially pronounced in Egypt, the most populous and arid nation downstream of the Nile, which depends entirely on the river as its only source of water for drinking and crop irrigation. The country currently faces one of the highest water budget deficits in Africa after decades of compensating for dwindling water supplies with intensive, large-scale wastewater reuse, the consequences of which have been understudied until now....

In 2014, NASA took significant steps on the agency’s journey to Mars — testing cutting-edge technologies and making scientific discoveries while studying our changing Earth and the infinite universe as the agency made progress on the next generation of air travel. “We continued to make great progress on our journey to Mars this year, awarding contracts to American companies who will return human space flight launches to U.S. soil, advancing space technology development; and successfully completing the first flight of Orion, the next deep space spacecraft in which our astronauts will travel,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden....

And they are younger, on average, when diagnosed with the disease. Firefighters who worked at the World Trade Center following the 9/11 attacks in 2001 are 13% more likely than colleagues who didn’t work at the site to develop cancer, particularly prostate and thyroid cancer, finds research published online in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine. They are also around 4 years younger, on average, when diagnosed, the findings indicate....

Researchers at the University of Alberta have shown that a drug used to treat deadly coronavirus infections in cats could potentially be an effective treatment against SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the global coronavirus pandemic. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications. The study, which was aided by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, paves the way for human clinical trials, which should begin soon, said Joanne Lemieux, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Alberta and the study’s senior author....

When a massive star exhausts its fuel, it collapses under its own gravity and produces a black hole, an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational grip. According to a new analysis by an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), just before the black hole forms, the dying star may generate a distinct burst of light that will allow astronomers to witness the birth of a new black hole for the first time....

“The novelty in our work is that we didn’t use sequencing methods widely used in this field, instead we used mass spectrometry, which is the first time this approach has been used to measure DNA modifications on purified, replicated DNA,” says Dr. Stewart-Morgan, co-first author of the report, from the Groth laboratory at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research (CPR) at the University of Copenhagen. This unique approach is the result of a joint project with the Hajkova laboratory at MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences (LMS)....

At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang Nebula is the coldest known object in the Universe – colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, which is the natural background temperature of space. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope have taken a new look at this intriguing object to learn more about its frigid properties and to determine its true shape, which has an eerily ghost-like appearance....

Scientists have discovered a potential cause of Earth’s “icehouse climate” cooling trend of the past 45 million years. It has everything to do with the chemistry of the world’s oceans. “Seawater chemistry is characterized by long phases of stability, which are interrupted by short intervals of rapid change,” says geoscientist Ulrich Wortmann of the University of Toronto, lead author of a paper reporting the results and published this week in the journal Science....

The study, which was published in the journal eLife, represents a significant step forward in the effort to improve care for the millions of people worldwide who are affected by conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. Neurodegenerative diseases occur when nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, known as neurons, break down, function abnormally, and eventually die. As neurons deteriorate, patients typically experience a range of gradually worsening neurological symptoms that can progress to debilitation and, in many cases, death....

“Our unprecedented survey of a large part of the Galactic center has given us detailed insights into the formation process of stars in this region of the Milky Way,” says Rainer Schödel from the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain, who led the observations. “Contrary to what had been accepted up to now, we found that the formation of stars has not been continuous,” adds Francisco Nogueras-Lara, who led two new studies of the Milky Way central region while at the same institute in Granada....

Apollo 7, which launched on October 11, 1968, and was nicknamed “The Walt, Wally and Donn Show,” was the first crewed Apollo mission to launch. The mission demonstrated the capabilities of the Command and Service Module, mission support facilities’ performance during a crewed mission, and Apollo rendezvous capability, as well as the first live TV broadcasts from space.

Alcoholic beverages have long been known to serve an important socio-cultural function in ancient societies, including at ritual feasts. A new study finds evidence of beer drinking 9,000 years ago in southern China, which was likely part of a ritual to honor the dead. The findings are based on an analysis of ancient pots found at a burial site at Qiaotou, making the site among the oldest in the world for early beer drinking....

Following the study’s findings, researchers believe that the Nesher Ramla Homo type is the ‘source’ population from which most humans of the Middle Pleistocene developed. In addition, they suggest that this group is the so-called ‘missing’ population that mated with Homo sapiens who arrived in the region around 200,000 years ago — about whom we know from a recent study on fossils found in the Misliya cave. Two teams of researchers took part in the dramatic discovery, published in the prestigious Science journal: an anthropology team from Tel Aviv University headed by Prof....