SA58, a new anti-COVID-19 monoclonal antibody nasal spray, has shown favorable efficacy in preventing COVID-19 infection, said two preliminary reports.

To test the efficacy and safety of the spray, which was developed by China's Sinovac Life Sciences Co, clinical studies were conducted with medical personnel working in designated COVID-19 hospitals and makeshift hospitals in the city of Hohhot in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, as well as with voluntary workers from 21 construction sites in Beijing.

The effectiveness of SA58 in preventing infection among Hohhot's medical staff was as high as 77.7 percent, and SA58 was able to lower the risk of COVID-19 infection by 61.83 percent among the study participants in Beijing, said the research results published on medRxiv, a preprint server for health sciences.

While the data has shown satisfactory efficacy and safety of SA58 in reducing symptomatic COVID-19 infections in healthy adults with early exposure within 72 hours, it cannot yet represent other kinds of groups including the elderly and people with underlying diseases.

SA58 has advantages over intramuscular injections, as it is less invasive and more acceptable to recipients. It is also convenient for medical personnel and other high-risk groups to use, said the research.

The recently revealed primary plan for China's crewed moon landing before 2030 where China in which attempt to use two launch vehicles and carry out two rendezvous and docking missions in lunar orbit, has drawn attention worldwide, and the China Space News, an authority news service for state-owned aerospace contractors, further explained that such plan would be highly effective in using China's most advanced space technology and more reliable and economic given it does not rely on the development of a special super heavy-lift rocket to achieve the goal of sending taikonauts to moon.

When the US and Soviet Union tried to execute a manned moon landing, the rendezvous and docking technology had yet to mature and it was also difficult to launch two or more launchers one after another within a short time period. So to develop a super heavy-lift rocket to send moon lander and crewed spacecraft all in one go was the easier and safer path to achieve the goal.

But things are different now. The current reality is that to develop a new-generation heavy-lift carrier rocket would take longer time and cost much more, let alone the difficulty. For example, the development for the US Space Launch System (SLS) took more than 10 years and counting, cost reached somewhere around $50 billion and the SLS is still using interim upper stage, the report pointed out.

Since China has mastered rather matured reliable space rendezvous and docking technology, a two-launcher path would be more reasonable and also feasible.

Zhang Hailian, deputy chief engineer with the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), disclosed earlier this month that China plans to realize a manned moon landing before 2030, and the country will attempt to build a moon-based scientific research station, in a bid to carry out long-term, systematic lunar research and verify relevant technology.

China will attempt to use two launch vehicles to send a moon surface lander and manned spacecraft into lunar orbit before they carry out rendezvous and docking with each other. Following this maneuver, the taikonauts onboard the manned spacecraft will enter the lander, Zhang said.

Taikonauts will carry out scientific exploration and sample collecting after they descend to the moon's surface using the lander. After completing all preset missions, they will engage the lander to ascend and dock with the manned spacecraft waiting in the lunar orbit, he said.

Then taikonauts will take the lunar samples and ascend from moon surface with the lander that will dock with the manned spacecraft again in lunar orbit before they return to Earth in the manned spacecraft.

A Beijing-based space watcher, who requested not to be named, told the Global Times on Tuesday that China's path of using two launchers for moon landing is no doubt most cost effective, and it fully takes advantage of China's technology strengths in terms of increasingly matured space rendezvous and docking ability which is repeatedly verified and honed in China Space Station missions over the recent years.

Leading Chinese rocket scientist Long Lehao has shown his own vision of China's moon landing in 2021, which also included two launch vehicles carrying a lunar lander and a next-generation manned spaceship for the mission, and the two parts of the spacecraft will rendezvous and dock in near-lunar orbit, before executing the landing process.

But different from Long's vision where he referred to the two launchers in question as Long March-5 DY - variant of the 57-meter-long Long March-5, China's strongest launcher in service, China is now developing the Long March-10 carrier rocket for the moon landing mission.

The new launcher will be a three-stage rocket with two boosters, weighing 2,187 tons at launch, increasing payload launching capability from Long March-5's 8.2 ton to the Lunar transfer orbit to around 27 ton, according to the China Space News, which is equivalent to the US SLS.

Considering that the development cost of the Long March 10 rocket is much lower than that of several heavy rockets in the United States, there is no doubt that China's manned lunar landing program will be more cost-effective and sustainability, the report noted.

A gang of grave robbers in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from 10 months to 20 months after three people died of carbon monoxide poisoning, a local court ruled on August 11.

On the eve of the Dragon Boat Festival in 2022, Chen and five others gathered together and brought tools such as shovels and pickaxes to illegally excavate ancient tombs on a mountainside in Aohan Banner in Chifeng in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. They stopped two days later due to rain.

Chen and others were unwilling to give up. Several days later, they gathered again adding several members to their group. However, they harbored ulterior motives and were unwilling to pay for the tools needed, which led to an internal conflict, resulting in the disbandment, according to an official from the People's Court of Aohan Banner.

More than a month later, Chen still couldn't accept what had happened and organized a group of eight people to dig up the cave at night. They bought gasoline pumping equipment to drain the accumulated water from the cave to keep digging.

However, the gasoline pumping equipment generated a large amount of carbon monoxide gas inside the cave, resulting in the poisoning and death of three people. According to the local court official, the incident of robbing grave was then exposed, and the other five people voluntarily turned themselves over to the police.

According to the local court, the defendants have violated the national cultural relics management system by secretly excavating ancient tombs with historical and scientific value. Their actions constituted the crime of grave robbery and are considered joint offenders.

The six defendants were sentenced to imprisonment ranging from 10 months to 20 months, with fines also being imposed on each member of the group.

The Aohan Banner has a rich historical and cultural heritage. According to the local court, over 4,000 ancient cultural sites and tombs from different periods have been discovered within the Aohan Banner, making it the leader in China. In recent years, the local court has been handling criminal acts related to the protection of cultural relics and cultural heritage in accordance with the law, as stated by local court officials.

Major Chinese photo agency Visual China Group (VCG) has come under fire after it sought 86,500 yuan ($11,853) from an astrophotographer for posting 173 photos that VCG claims to own the copyright to. However, all the pictures were taken by the photographer himself and never uploaded to VCG. The photo agency has now found itself caught in the middle of a huge controversy surrounding its history of copyright over-claiming.

Although VCG later stated that they obtained legal licenses for these works from other platforms, the photographer refused to accept the explanation. Stocktrek Images, to which Dai uploaded these photos, said on Wednesday that it has contacted VCG and demanded it remove the photos, Chinese media outlets reported.

As the two sides continue to tussle, the Chinese internet is once again buzzing with discussion about copyright ownership. 

Dai Jianfeng, also known as Jeff Dai, is a specialist in astronomical photography with a fanbase of over 2 million users on his personal Sina Weibo account. On Tuesday afternoon, he fired an accusation at VCG, saying it was seeking compensation from him for using his own photos, which he described as "outrageous."

"Today, I got a call from VCG saying that my public post had used 173 of their photos in a manner that breaches their copyright and that I will have to pay them over 80,000 yuan," Dai wrote on his Sina Weibo account on Tuesday afternoon.

When Dai looked into the claim, he found that all the "infringing photos" turned out to be photos he had taken himself. 

"I have never worked with VCG on these photos and never uploaded them to their gallery," Dai said, questioning why VCG would own the copyright to the photos and ask him to pay compensation.

According to screenshots Dai posted of the email he claims was sent to him by VCG, the photo agency said that Dai made unauthorized use of the images, several of which were taken in 2018. VCG offered two solutions, a partnership between the parties for 300 yuan per photo, or a settlement between the parties in which Dai would pay 500 yuan for each photo.

These photos can indeed be downloaded from the VCG gallery. Author information for some of the images was listed as Jeff Dai/Stocktrek Images/Getty Creative.

Dai then demanded VCG provide an explanation for "where it obtained the photos that were sold illegally" and "how much illegal profit it has made."

VCG responded on Tuesday night by claiming that the images were licensed by Dai to the stock photo library Stocktrek Images for sale, which in turn licensed them to Getty Images for sale. VCG is the exclusive partner of Getty Images in the Chinese mainland and therefore has the right to sell these images.

The chain of sales authorizations for the images in question is clear and complete, said VCG, promising to continue communicating with the photographer to "properly address the misunderstanding."

However, Dai again refuted VCG's claims on Wednesday, stating that Stocktrek Images had confirmed to him that VCG does not have the right to sell his work, nor does it have any copyrights to his work. Getty Images also does not have the right to re-license his work.

"There is no misunderstanding here," he said. 

"To this day, you [VCG] continue to illegally sell my work online, falsely claiming to me and others that you own the copyright to it. Please stop your infringing behavior immediately!"

According to the information disclosed by both parties so far, the copyright of the relevant pictures is owned by the photographer, Yue Shenshan, a Beijing-based lawyer, told the China News Service. 

If what Dai disclosed is true, then Getty Images has no right to sublicense the images, which means VCG does not have the right to sell the images and its actions have violated the photographer's copyright, said Yue.

After Dai exposed this incident, many netizens voiced support in his defense, noting that the over-assertion of copyrights by big platforms like VCG has been a long-standing problem.

Some netizens have pointed out that neither side has yet shown concrete evidence to show whether or not Dai ceded the copyrights to the photos when he sold his work.

However, Dai had revealed in a Sina Weibo post in 2018 that he had signed contracts with VCG. It is not clear whether the content of the signing between the two parties is related to the photos in this incident.

Whether or not the photographer's own use of his or her work is infringing depends on the specific agreement between the two parties when the photographer licensed his or her work to the photo agencies, Yue said.

VCG has stirred controversy on several occasions over past years. In 2019, it claimed copyright over the first-ever photo of a black hole as well as the Chinese flag and national emblem, prompting an online debate on Chinese copyright practices. After the exposure of the latest controversy, many companies have also revealed that their company logos have been listed as copyrighted VCG images.

VCG and its subsidiaries filed more than 2,000 lawsuits alleging copyright violations in 2017 and 2018 alone.

When Columbus discovered America, European culture hadn’t yet grasped the concept of discovery. Various languages had verbs that could be translated as discover, but only in the sense of discovering things like a worm under a rock. Scholars operated within a worldview that all knowledge had been articulated by the ancients, such as Ptolemy, the astronomer who compiled the mathematical details of the Earth-centered universe. As it happened, Ptolemy was also the greatest of ancient geographers. So when Columbus showed that Ptolemy’s grasp on geography was flawed, it opened the way for Copernicus to challenge Ptolemy on his picture of the cosmos as well. Deep thinkers who were paying attention then realized that nature possessed secrets for humankind to “discover.”
“The existence of the idea of discovery is a necessary precondition for science,” writes historian David Wootton. “The discovery of America in 1492 created a new enterprise that intellectuals could engage in: the discovery of new knowledge.”

Appreciating the concept of discovery was not enough to instigate the invention of science. The arrival of the printing press in the mid-15th century was also especially essential. It standardized and magnified the ability of scholars to disseminate knowledge, enabling the growth of communities, cooperation and competition. Late medieval artists’ development of geometrical principles underlying perspective in paintings also provided important mathematical insights. Other key concepts (like discovery) required labeling and clarifying, among them the idea of “evidence.”

And modern science’s birth required a trigger, a good candidate being the supernova observed by Tycho Brahe in 1572. Suddenly, the heavens became changeable, contradicting the Aristotelian dogma of eternal changeless perfection in the sky. Tycho’s exploding star did not cause the scientific revolution, Wootton avers, but it did announce the revolution’s beginning.

In The Invention of Science, Wootton incorporates these insights into an idiosyncratic but deeply thoughtful account of the rise of science, disagreeing frequently with mainstream science historians and philosophers. He especially scorns the relativists who contend that different scientific views are all mere social constructions such that no one is better than any other. Wootton agrees that approaches to science may be socially influenced in their construction, but nevertheless the real world constrains the success of any given approach.

Wootton’s book offers a fresh approach to the history of science with details not usually encountered in the standard accounts. It might not be the last or even best word in understanding modern science’s origins or practice, but it certainly has identified aspects that, if ignored, would leave an inadequate picture, lacking important perspective.

Using flashes of blue light, scientists have pulled forgotten memories out of the foggy brains of mice engineered to have signs of early Alzheimer’s disease. This memory rehab feat, described online March 16 in Nature, offers new clues about how the brain handles memories, and how that process can go awry.

The result “provides a theoretical mechanism for reviving old, forgotten memories,” says Yale School of Medicine neurologist Arash Salardini. Memory manipulations, such as the retrieval of lost memories and the creation of false memories, were “once the realm of science fiction,” he says. But this experiment and other recent work have now accomplished these feats, at least in rodents (SN: 12/27/14, p. 19), he says.
To recover a lost memory, scientists first had to mark it. Neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa of MIT and colleagues devised a system that tagged the specific nerve cells that stored a memory — in this case, an association between a particular cage and a shock. A virus delivered a gene for a protein that allowed researchers to control this collection of memory-holding nerve cells. The genetic tweak caused these cells to fire off signals in response to blue laser light, letting Tonegawa and colleagues call up the memory with light delivered by an optic fiber implanted in the brain.

A day after receiving a shock in a particular cage, mice carrying two genes associated with Alzheimer’s seemed to have forgotten their ordeal; when put back in that cage, these mice didn’t seem as frightened as mice without the Alzheimer’s-related genes. But when the researchers used light to restore this frightening memory, it caused the mice to freeze in place in a different cage. (Freezing in a new venue showed that laser activation of the memory cells, and not environmental cues, caused the fear reaction.)

The fact that this memory could be pulled out with light helps clarify the source of memory trouble for people with Alzheimer’s, Tonegawa says. In this experiment, the mice appeared able to form and store a memory but not call it up. “It’s a retrieval problem, not a storage problem,” Tonegawa says.

That’s in line with what many clinicians now believe to be happening in early Alzheimer’s, says Salardini. People in the early stages of the disease seem able to create new memories, but then rapidly forget them, he says. Memories can sometimes be strengthened with reminders and clues from the environment, suggesting that they are “somewhere in there,” but not retrievable, he says.

Further experiments with the mice showed that the fear memory could be strengthened by forcing it to appear multiple times. This memory boot camp worked because it boosted the number of docking sites on memory-holding nerve cells in the mice with Alzheimer’s-related genes. Usually, these docking sites — knobs called dendritic spines that receive messages from other nerve cells — become scarcer with age. To counter that, Tonegawa and colleagues used light to repeatedly activate nerve cells that in turn activate the memory-holding cells. Compared with mice that didn’t get this strengthening treatment, mice with the Alzheimer’s genes that underwent this process were more fearful of the cage where they had received a shock, even six days later.
Tonegawa cautions that the results are experimental. “We have not done anything to cure human Alzheimer’s patients,” he says. And the methods, which rely on viruses to genetically engineer brain cells and optic fibers implanted in the brain, are not currently feasible for people.

But insights gained from this experiment, and others like it, do help clarify how memory works in people, says neuroscientist Christine Denny of Columbia University. “If we can understand how the process of memory retrieval is compromised and where it is impaired, then we can begin to develop treatments to target those processes or circuits.”

As the weather warms, watch for falling rocks. While monitoring a cracked cliff in Yosemite National Park, researchers watched the fissure widen as temperatures rose. The risk of rockfalls could increase as climate change cranks the thermostat, one scientist predicts.

For three and a half years, geologists Brian Collins of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., and Greg Stock of the National Park Service in Yosemite monitored a 19-meter-long crack in one of the park’s cliffs. The crack had a maximum width of about 12 centimeters. A measuring device anchored to both sides of the crack recorded changes in its size. The gap grew and shrank by as much as a centimeter daily as temperature changes caused the rock to expand and contract, the researchers report online March 28 in Nature Geoscience. Some effects lingered, however: The gap widened over the course of several summers and the constant size fluctuations further weakened the rock, the researchers say.

Around 25,000 tons of rocks and debris slipped down Yosemite’s slopes in 2015 — enough to fill more than three Olympic-sized swimming pools. About 15 percent of rockfalls from Yosemite’s granite cliffs occur during summer and at the hottest times of day. The rockfall risk could grow along with the cracks as the climate warms, geoscientist Valentin Gischig of ETH Zurich in Switzerland proposes in a perspective piece on the new finding.

The pale arch of light from the plane of our galaxy can be a humbling sight on a clear, dark night. But it’s just a sliver of all the treasures lurking in the Milky Way. Dense clouds of interstellar dust block visible light from remote regions of the galaxy but allow longer wavelengths to pass through. In February, astronomers completed a new map of our galaxy as seen in submillimeter light, which is shorter than radio waves but longer than infrared waves.

Submillimeter light can penetrate dust clouds, revealing details at the center of the galaxy and in stellar nurseries not visible at other wavelengths. The map was produced by ATLASGAL, a project using the APEX telescope in northern Chile to map part of the Milky Way. The project charted one-third of the band of galactic light that encircles our solar system; the images below show a narrow slice toward the constellation Sagittarius.
Combined with images from the Spitzer and Planck satellites, the ATLASGAL map (top row) creates a detailed atlas of some of the cold structures in our galaxy. Dust clouds in places like the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas (circled, left), both a few thousand light-years away, glow faintly, as do filaments of detritus in the center of the galaxy (circled, right), 28,000 light-years from Earth. At near-infrared wave-lengths (center row), these regions nearly vanish behind obscuring curtains of dust. The galactic center remains hidden in visible light (bottom row) as well, though hot stars in Trifid and Lagoon radiate pools of hydrogen gas, making them glow.

A sugar that freshens air in rooms may also clean cholesterol out of hardened arteries.

The sugar, cyclodextrin, removed cholesterol that had built up in the arteries of mice fed a high-fat diet, researchers report April 6 in Science Translational Medicine. The sugar enhances a natural cholesterol-removal process and persuades immune cells to soothe inflammation instead of provoking it, say immunologist Eicke Latz and colleagues.

Cyclodextrin, more formally known as 2-hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin, is the active ingredient in the air freshener Febreze. It is also used in a wide variety of drugs; it helps make hormones, antifungal chemicals, steroids and other compounds soluble. If the new results hold up in human studies, the sugar may also one day be used to liquefy cholesterol that clogs arteries.
Other researchers say the approach is promising, but must be tested in clinical trials. The sweet molecule is generally considered safe, but injecting it may raise the risk of liver damage or hearing loss, says Elena Aikawa, a vascular biologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Mice taking cyclodextrin in the study did not exhibit side effects from the treatment, but previous work has indicated that the sugar may damage hearing in mice and cats. The molecule shunts cholesterol through the liver, so large cholesterol influxes might cause fat to build up in the liver, impairing its function. “Overall, cyclodextrin seems worth exploring as a therapeutic, although caution should be taken,” Aikawa says.

Cyclodextrin works by flipping a master switch, a gene called LXR, Latz and colleagues found. LXR’s protein turns on other genes involved in processing cholesterol and ushering it out of the body. The sugar also activated the LXR genes in human arteries examined in the lab and turned on inflammation-calming processes, Latz’s team discovered.

Latz, of the University Hospital Bonn in Germany, credits Nevada businesswoman Chris Hempel with the idea to use cyclodextrin to treat atherosclerosis. In people with the condition, cholesterol, calcium, immune cells and other substances form plaques inside arteries, hardening them. Plaques block blood flow and can break away and cause heart attacks and strokes (SN: 2/20/16, p. 32).

Hempel has twin daughters with a rare genetic disease known as Niemann-Pick Type C, in which cholesterol crystals clog organs, especially the brain. In 2009, the girls got special permission from the Food and Drug Administration for their doctor to give them infusions of cyclodextrin to dissolve the cholesterol crystals.
Hempel later read a paper by Latz and colleagues in which the researchers described how cholesterol crystals irritate macrophages and provoke them to cause inflammation and heart disease. Macrophages normally patrol the body and help kill invading bacteria, viruses and other pathogens. The immune cells also gobble up cholesterol and deliver it to the liver where it can be made into bile and escorted out of the body in feces.

Hempel e-mailed Latz and suggested that cyclodextrin might melt the cholesterol crystals in arteries. Latz and his colleagues tested the idea by feeding mice genetically prone to atherosclerosis a high-fat diet and giving the animals regular injections of cyclodextrin under the skin. The sugar kept cholesterol plaques from building up in the rodents’ arteries. The scientists also found that cyclodextrin reduced already established plaques in mice by about 45 percent, even though the animals were still eating a high-fat diet.

Cyclodextrin could be used in combination with other drugs, such as statins, says Eran Elinav, an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Statins and other drugs inhibit cholesterol production. “Potentially, combining cholesterol lowering with dissolution of preformed cholesterol in plaques could be additive,” Elinav says, “but this option needs to be explored in clinical trials.”

Although cyclodextrin is already approved by the FDA for use in people, it may be years before it’s known whether injecting the sugar will soften people’s hardened arteries. The sugar is not patentable, so no pharmaceutical companies have come forward to sponsor expensive clinical trials needed to get approval for this specific use, Latz says.

SALT LAKE CITY — A new map of the sky charts the origins of some of the highest energy photons ever detected. Researchers from the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory released their first year of observations of gamma rays, ultrahigh-energy light particles blasted in our direction from some of the most extreme environments in the universe.

The researchers found 40 gamma-ray sources, a quarter of which hadn’t previously been identified, they reported April 18 at an American Physical Society meeting. The map is “revealing new information about nature’s particle accelerators,” said Brenda Dingus, a leader of the HAWC collaboration. These accelerators include the relics of dead stars, such as supernova remnants, and active galaxies that shoot out blasts of particles, known as blazars.
From its perch on the edge of a dormant volcano in Mexico, HAWC detects gamma rays using 300 tanks of water, which cover an area the size of four football fields and register faint light signals from showers of particles produced when gamma rays slam into Earth’s atmosphere.

The team found new sources in areas that had already been searched by other high-energy gamma-ray telescopes. “That’s a little perplexing,” said Dingus. The discrepancy could be due to the fact that HAWC observes higher energy gamma rays, or that the sources are too spread out for the other telescopes to find.

In a region near a previously known gamma-ray source, the scientists found two other potential sources. They nicknamed the group “the executioner” — the bright gamma ray hot spots in the map bore some resemblance to a sinister human figure. If the name sticks, Dingus said, “it would be the first gamma-ray constellation.”