Universal Imbalance

Scientists think that they’ve taken a step toward finally understanding one of the greatest mysteries of the universe: why it exists in the first place.

When the universe formed, it created both antimatter and matter, which destroy each other when they meet. So why there’s enough matter left to form all the galaxies, stars, and worlds out there is a key question.

Now, Scientific American reports that scientists have made substantial progress toward providing an answer.

Piecing It Together

The theory, called leptogenesis, posits that the Big Bang spewed out a massive number of subatomic particles called neutrinos. When those neutrinos eventually broke apart, leptogenesis suggests that they happened to form more matter byproducts than antimatter ones.

New findings out of Japan’s Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) experiment, which were published last week in the journal Nature, aren’t definitive evidence of the leptogenesis theory. But, pending the many follow-up experiments and analyses that would be necessary to actually make that declaration, SciAm reports that the findings do seem to strongly suggest that leptogenesis is on to something.

Missing Data

The study suggested there’s a 95 percent chance that the neutrinos break down into an uneven proportion of matter to antimatter, a measurement called CP violation. That sounds convincing, but it’s not good enough for such a fundamental mystery of the universe.

“We don’t call it a discovery yet,” Stony Brook University researcher and T2K team member Chang Kee Jung told SciAm.

READ MORE: Antimatter Discovery Reveals Clues about the Universe’s Beginning [Scientific American]

More on neutrinos: Shocking Research Threatens Our Understanding of Dark Matter

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Tiny Flyers

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania say we could one day explore the surface of Mars using a fleet of “nanocardboard” aircraft that each weigh as much as a fruit fly and feature no moving parts.

The tiny flyers, as outlined in the study first published in the journal Advanced Materials in February, work by harnessing the power of temperature differentials between the upper and lower side. When a bright light like the Sun shines on one side, it heats up, circulating air through corrugated channels — hence “cardboard” — and providing thrust.

Thermal Creeps

So far, the researchers managed to fly tiny payloads in the form of silicone rings, inside a low-pressure test chamber that simulates the Martian environment. The team is now working on miniaturizing chemical sensors that the tiny flyers could use to detect water on Mars.

“The air current through these micro-channels is caused by a classical phenomenon called ‘thermal creep,'” explained co-author Howard Hu in a statement, “which is a rarefied gas flow due to the temperature gradient along the channel wall.”

Nanocardboard > Helicopter

The “nanocardboard” flyers are far simpler in design than the Mars Helicopter NASA is sending to the Red Planet this summer, alongside its next rover, Perseverance.

“The Mars Helicopter is very exciting, but it’s still a single, complicated machine,” said lead researcher Igor Bargatin, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, in the statement.

“If anything goes wrong, your experiment is over, since there’s no way of fixing it,” Bargatin added. “We’re proposing an entirely different approach that doesn’t put all of your eggs in one basket.”

READ MORE: Tiny, levitating ‘nanocardboard’ aircraft could explore Mars one day [Space.com]

More on the Mars Helicopter: NASA’S NEW MARS ROVER STILL LAUNCHING IN JULY DESPITE CORONAVIRUS

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Scientists and healthcare workers are still trying to make sense of the many symptoms of COVID-19.

From extensive lung and blood vessel damage to the loss of smell and taste and even strange discoloration of toes, questions linger about the deadly virus currently sweeping the globe.

Now, doctors are noticing mysterious blood clots in COVID-19 patients that may be causing extremely low oxygen levels — so low that they should be unconscious or even dead — but still acting normally, according to The Washington Post.

The strange clots have even prompted some doctors have suggested giving blood thinners to all COVID patients, including the ones not sick enough to be hospitalized.

Autopsies showed that patients’ lungs were filled with hundreds of tiny clots or microclots rather than one large hemorrhage that could’ve caused a stroke or heart attack.

“The problem we are having is that while we understand that there is a clot, we don’t yet understand why there is a clot,” Lewis Kaplan, a University of Pennsylvania physician, told the Post. “We don’t know. And therefore, we are scared.”

Researchers are now investigating whether these microclots could play a role in deaths across the country.

But first, they are trying to understand what is causing them in the first place.

“One of the theories is that once the body is so engaged in a fight against an invader, the body starts consuming the clotting factors, which can result in either blood clots or bleeding,” Kaplan told the Post.

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Tour Group

A team of astronomers thinks it’s found a whole slew of interstellar visitors — asteroids that came from elsewhere but got trapped in the Sun’s gravitational pull — orbiting out near Jupiter.

The 19 asteroids, known as the Centaurs, were first spotted as early as 2015, Gizmodo reports. But scientists are still making sense of their unusual behavior.

Putting Down Roots

Typically, interstellar visitors like 21/Borisov and ‘Oumuamua pass through the solar system on their cosmic journeys, making it all the more interesting that the Centaurs stuck around. One interstellar visitor is still a rare scientific find, and identifying an entire population is unprecedented.

After reverse-engineering the asteroids’ orbits, many of which fall on a bizarre plane or revolve in the wrong direction, the team concluded in research shared online on Wednesday that the best explanation for what’s going on is that the objects drifted in from interstellar space.

Paper Trail

It’s still possible that the asteroids have unusual orbits for some other reason. Gizmodo reports that some astronomers have pushed back against the team’s earlier publications on the Centaurs — but haven’t yet debunked it with peer-reviewed research.

The main problem other academics had with the team’s ongoing research is that they didn’t fully eliminate other possibilities for why the Centaurs are so, well, weird. But given that “they came from elsewhere” is one of the few explanations for the asteroids’ orbits that didn’t violate the laws of physics, the team is pretty confident in their work.

READ MORE: Astronomers Think They’ve Found a Whole Population of Rocks From Outside the Solar System [Gizmodo]

More on interstellar visitors: NASA Releases New Image of Interstellar Visitor

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Ass-Backwards

A number of American billionaires have used the coronavirus pandemic to grow even wealthier than they were before.

In fact, billionaires in the U.S. have increased their wealth by a combined $282 billion, Fast Company reports. That’s a ten percent increase over where the billionaire class stood at the beginning of March — illustrating how the global crisis has furthered global inequality.

No Options

Some of that newfound wealth came from how consumer behavior has changed since people found themselves stuck at home during the quarantine.

For instance, the video conferencing software Zoom saw a surge in new users as isolated friends and family sought a way to connect online. As a result, Fast Company reports that Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has personally made $2.58 billion over the past two months.

Unfair Advantage

But market changes alone don’t explain how people like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk or all of how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos have walked away with significant increases to their net worth. The rest comes from numerous tax breaks and loopholes, not unlike how Microsoft founder Bill Gates actually grew wealthier after pivoting to largescale philanthropy.

“We’re reading about benevolent billionaires sharing .0001% of their wealth with their fellow humans in this crisis,” inequality researcher Chuck Collins told Fast Company, “but in fact they’ve been rigging the tax rules to reduce their taxes for decades — money that could have been spent building a better public health infrastructure.”

READ MORE: American billionaires have gotten $280 billion richer since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic [Fast Company]

More on the mega-rich: The Wealthy Are Hiding From the Pandemic in Underground Bunkers

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These Billionaires Are Making a Killing Off the Pandemic

Researchers at Beijing pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech have developed an experimental COVID-19 vaccine that it says protected macaques from infection, Science Magazine reports.

The vaccine was based on a tried-and-true formulation that included an inactivated version of the virus SARS-CoV-2, as detailed in a preprint uploaded to the server bioRxiv on April 19.

“These data support the rapid clinical development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for humans,” reads the paper.

The team at Sinovac injected eight macaque monkeys with two different doses. Three weeks after injection, they introduced the coronavirus straight into the money’s lungs. There were reportedly no side effects.

None of the monkeys developed an infection beyond a small “viral blip.” A less fortunate control group of monkeys developed severe pneumonia after being infected by the virus.

“This is old school but it might work,” Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-authored a status report on COVID vaccine candidates, told Science Mag. “What I like most is that many vaccine producers, also in lower–middle-income countries, could make such a vaccine.”

Critics say, though, that the sample size in Sinovac’s trial was too small to produce generalizable results. Questions also remain about the viability of the vaccine candidate for use in humans — especially considering that monkeys don’t experience the same severe symptoms of COVID as humans.

In a separate Sinovac experiment, the researchers mixed a cocktail of antibodies from patients in China, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and the United Kingdom with the virus.

According to the team, the antibodies “potently neutralized 10 representative SARS-CoV-2 strains, indicative of a possible broader neutralizing ability.”

And that’d be good news.

“This provides strong evidence that the virus is not mutating in a way that would make it resistant to a #COVID19 vaccine,” tweeted of Oregon Health & Science University immunologist Mark Slifka on Wednesday.

Sinovac Biotech is now planning trials on thousands of human subjects.

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Reckitt Benckiser, the British company behind the cleaning product brands Lysol and Dettol, is urging customers not to consume its cleaning supplies after U.S. President Donald Trump suggested scientists should try to inject COVID patients with disinfectants.

No, we’re not making this up.

In a statement, the company was forced to reiterate that Lysol wipes should not be on the menu.

“As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route),” the company wrote.

Trump made a series of mind-boggling claims on Thursday about injecting cleaning products — and even UV light — into the human body, without basing any of them on any scientific evidence or even common sense.

“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in one minute,” Trump said, as quoted by CNN. “Is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning… it would be interesting to check that. It sounds interesting to me.”

It’s a delusional statement that may well cause some who don’t know better to put themselves at risk — and at the worst time possible.

On Monday — days before Trump’s rant — the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that poison center calls related to cleaners and disinfectants were up 20 percent over last year, which is likely related to fear of the coronavirus.

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On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested a number of bizarre and untested treatments for COVID-19 patients.

Chief among them, NBC News reports, was injecting some sort of disinfectant — Trump never specified which — into patient’s lungs to kill any viruses lingering there. He also suggested somehow putting high levels of ultraviolet radiation “inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way.”

“This notion of injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible and it’s dangerous,” University of Washington healthcare researcher Vin Gupta told NBC. “It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves.”

The President’s suggestions were so outlandish that even his science advisor, Dr. Deborah Birx, appeared baffled and defeated while he was making them.

Here is Dr. Birx's reaction when President Trump asks his science advisor to study using UV light on the human body and injecting disinfectant to fight the coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/MVno5X7JMA

— Daniel Lewis (@Daniel_Lewis3) April 24, 2020

While it’s likely not a shock to many that Trump has a weak grasp on medical science, his latest ideas for how to fight the coronavirus illustrate a serious systematic problem.

As NBC reporter Ben Collins tweeted, Trump’s strategy seems to be mostly comprised of jumping from one unproven treatment to another in hopes that something will eventually stick.

The bleach and alcohol stuff is deeply worrying, but what's much more alarming is that the executive plan now appears to be bumbling from viral miracle cure to viral miracle cure with supreme confidence, hoping at every turn that people forgot about the last one.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) April 24, 2020

And that’s a dangerous approach.

Trump spent weeks pushing the drug hydroxychloroquine, even though there was no good evidence that it would help COVID-19 patients. All the same, doctors investigated it at the President’s behest, just to find that it seemed to increase the death rate of coronavirus patients without helping them.

On top of that, one man died after ingesting similar compounds on his own.

Needless to say, injecting disinfectant into people won’t do any better.

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NASA Ventilator

A team of NASA researchers have developed a ventilator for treating COVID-19 patients in just 37 days. The space agency is now asking the US Food and Drug Administration for a fast-tracked approval.

According to a statement, the machine was “tailored to treat coronavirus patients” — and “passed a critical test” earlier this week.

VITAL

The device, dubbed VITAL (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), was developed by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“We specialize in spacecraft, not medical-device manufacturing,” said JPL Director Michael Watkins in the statement. “But excellent engineering, rigorous testing and rapid prototyping are some of our specialties.”

Meeting Expectations

According to NASA, the ventilator is easier to build and to maintain than a traditional one, as there are far fewer parts. It can also be modified for use in field hospitals.

“The NASA prototype performed as expected under a wide variety of simulated patient conditions,” Matthew Levin, Director of Innovation at the Icahn School of Medicine said in the statement. “The team feels confident that the VITAL ventilator will be able to safely ventilate patients suffering from COVID-19 both here in the United States and throughout the world.”

READ MORE: NASA develops ventilator prototype in just 37 days [The Hill]

More on ventilators: EXPERTS SAY PUTTING MULTIPLE PATIENTS ON ONE VENTILATOR IS UNSAFE

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Two-Course Meal

In a gruesome bit of cosmic drama, a distant star was partially devoured by a black hole but managed to escape, at least for the time being.

Looking at x-ray data from NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) observatories, astronomers found what appear to be the remnants of a red giant star that veered too close to a black hole. As a result, the star’s outer layers were stripped away — but its core, now just a white dwarf, managed to survive.

Buying Time

Unfortunately for the half-eaten star, astronomers predict the black hole will continue to snack until only a small fraction remains.

“It will try hard to get away, but there is no escape,” lead researcher Andrew King, from the University of Leicester, said in a press release. “The black hole will eat it more and more slowly, but never stop.”

“In principle, this loss of mass would continue until and even after the white dwarf dwindled down to the mass of Jupiter, in about a trillion years,” King added. “This would be a remarkably slow and convoluted way for the universe to make a planet!”

Dining Out

While this near-death experience is a rare find, the fact that he saw it at all leads King to believe that it happens fairly often.

“In astronomical terms, this event is only visible to our current telescopes for a short time — about 2,000 years,” King said. “So unless we were extraordinarily lucky to have caught this one, there may be many more that we are missing.”

READ MORE: Star survives close call with a black hole [Chandra X-ray Center]

More on cosmic destruction: Scientists Release Incredible Video of Black Hole Spewing Matter

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Stay Home

If there wasn’t a global pandemic going on, NASA’s upcoming SpaceX launch — the first to send astronauts into space from U.S. soil since 2011 — would be a huge spectacle.

But this time around, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine urged would-be spectators to stay home and stay safe, Space.com reports. Bridenstine still hopes the public will tune in online, but said on a Thursday conference call that they definitely shouldn’t break quarantine to do so.

Tuning In

The May 27 launch, which will send two crewmembers to the International Space Station, will carry American astronauts on a SpaceX rocket that blasts off of an American launchpad. As a result, Bridenstine said he would normally expect a bigger-than-average crowd.

“Yes, we are moving forward,” Bridenstine said of the launch. “We are very excited about launching commercial crew. We are asking people to join us in this launch, but to do so from home. We’re asking people not to travel to the Kennedy Space Center.”

Locked Out

NAA will close the Kennedy Space Center to the public, Space.com reports. But it’s still possible for rocket fans to catch a glimpse of the launch from the surrounding area or a nearby beach.

Keeping people who ignore his warning from congregating in those areas, Bridenstine said, is up being left to local authorities.

READ MORE: NASA chief to space fans: Don’t travel to Florida to watch SpaceX’s 1st astronaut launch [Space.com]

More on the crewed launch: SpaceX Is Officially Sending Astronauts to Space Next Month

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The United States has ditched a global initiative led by the World Health Organization to accelerate cooperation on a coronavirus vaccine and to openly share information on possible treatments and technologies, as The Guardian reports.

“There will be no U.S. official participation,” a spokesman for the US mission in Geneva told Reuters.

WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted the importance of cooperation after the US made the decision not to join.

“We are facing a common threat that we can only defeat with a common approach,” he said. “The world needs these tools and needs them fast.”

A number of world leaders and luminaries — including German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Emmanuel Macron, and philanthropist Bill Gates — decided to make a pledge via a virtual conference call, agreeing to share research without hesitation.

The sharing of scientific knowledge is more important than ever as the number of global cases and deaths continues to rise. Scientists are searching for possible treatments at a record pace.

A vaccine could also be key to eventually allowing societies to return to normal — and stop global economies from hemorrhaging.

The news comes after president Donald Trump decided to completely pull WHO funding last week, an action widely criticized by experts. Bill Gates called the move “as dangerous as it sounds,” arguing that “the world needs the WHO now more than ever.”

The US response to the crisis has been marred by dangerous comments made by Trump, plans to reopen entire states as early as this week despite numerous warning calls from experts, and a failure to make sufficient numbers of COVID-19 tests available to all of its citizens.

Macron criticized the US’ decision to withdraw from the plans.

“We will continue now to mobilize all G7 and G20 countries so they get behind this initiative,” Macron said during the meeting. “And I hope we will be able to reconcile around this joint initiative both China and the US, because this is about saying the fight against Covid-19 is a common human good and there should be no division in order to win this battle.”

Some of the pledges the world leaders made during the call included providing access to new research regarding treatments and vaccines globally and to commit to collective decision making.

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Forging Ahead

China says that it’s still on schedule for the mission to Mars it plans to launch later this year.

The mission, originally slated for a July launch date, is set to happen “in the coming months,” according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA), CNN reports. On top of that, the mission finally has a name: “Tianwen 1,” which translates roughly to “heavenly questions.”

Wherefore Art Thou

The name comes from poetry written more than 2,000 years ago, according to state-run news agency XinhuaNet. In the piece, the ancient poet Qu Yuan questioned traditional narratives around the mythology of the era, especially as it pertained to space, the Earth, and other natural phenomena.

The mission plans on sending a rover to the surface of Mars to study the planet’s atmosphere, environment, and the composition of its soil, CNN reports. The rover will be accompanied by an orbiter and a lander, all three of which will be equipped with scientific instruments.

Bronze Medal

If the mission succeeds, China will become the third country to successfully land a rover on Mars after the U.S. and Russia.

But that’s assuming China is able to maintain its original launch schedule. Other space agencies around the world have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic — so it’s possible that the CNSA will face unexpected delays as well.

READ MORE: China reveals name of Mars mission, which will take place in ‘coming months’ [CNN]

More on space: China Powers Through the Coronavirus To Launch a Mars Mission

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As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, the sheer number of people currently living in quarantine poses an unprecedented challenge for humanity.

A team of European neuroscientists and philosophers say that living in isolation poses a unique, uncharted threat that flies in the face of the base human instinct for connection — and one that deserves better recognition from world leaders.

In an essay published in the May edition of the journal Current Biology, the researchers argue that living in quarantine and separating ourselves from one another contradicts the urge to come together during difficult times.

“Hazardous conditions make us more — not less — social,” Olivia Deroy, a philosopher and neuroscientist at Munich’s Ludwigs-Maximilians Universitaet, said in a press release. “Coping with this contradiction is the biggest challenge we now face.”

The team doesn’t suggest that quarantines should be lifted just so people can reunite — doing so would be unimaginably hazardous from a public health standpoint.

Rather, they want to see more attention given and better access granted to the ways that people can still come together, whether that’s improved accessibility to high-speed internet or specific platforms that people can use to socialize.

“When people are afraid, they seek safety in numbers,” Guillaume Dezecache, a social psychologist at the Université Clermont Auvergne, said in the release. “But in the present situation, this impulse increases the risk of infection for all of us. This is the basic evolutionary conundrum that we describe.”

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Your mouth is a zoo of bacteria. And in a new series of astonishing (ly disturbing) images assembled by a team of researchers, we get to experience this diverse biome in all its psychedelic, multicolored glory — with each funky color representing a different species of bacteria, as Science Alert reports.

“The tongue is particularly important because it harbors a large reservoir of microbes and is a traditional reference point in medicine,” said Jessica Mark Welch, co-author of the study published in the journal Cell Reports and microbial ecologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, in a statement. “‘Stick out your tongue’ is one of the first things a doctor says.”

“We think that learning who is next to who will help us understand how these communities work,” Welch added.

The species range from Streptococcigreen around the edges of the tongue where they can gobble up oxygen, shown in green, to actinomyces, which thrive in an anaerobic environment away from the edges, in red. Rothia, shown in cyan, keeps away from either of those border regions.

In total, there are more than 700 species of bacteria that call our mouths their home. however, the three genera of bacteria identified above were found in 80 percent of the 21 healthy tongues the researchers collected samples from.

To separate these oxygen-rich and -poor environments, the bacteria form layers of protective slime referred to as “biofilm.”

“Bacteria behave differently in a biofilm,” co-author Mark Welch said. “There are parts of their metabolism they only turn on in a biofilm, and they tend to be more resistant to antibiotics and changes in the environment.”

The scientists’ research also suggests that small bumps on the surface of the human tongue exist to allow certain kinds of bacteria to create nitric oxide, an important chemical for controlling blood pressure — a process that the human body isn’t capable of taking care of by itself.

READ MORE: Incredible Images Show How Bacteria Set Up Tiny Colonies on Your Tongue [Science Alert]

More on the tongue: IBM Unveils New “Electronic Tongue” to Taste and Identify Liquids

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Nasty Images Show How Bacteria Colonize Your Tongue

As the coronavirus pandemic overwhelms hospitals and health workers, expecting and new mothers around the world are facing a number of unexpected challenges.

Many who have gone into labor since the pandemic took hold had to give birth with far less support than they anticipated, CNET reports. Midwives and doulas are sometimes cut out of the equation because of disease transmission fears, doctors are overworked and preoccupied, and new restrictions on visitors mean that many have given birth with no loved ones around except perhaps their partner — any other family members trying to attend would be stuck on the other side of a locked door.

“The impact of those restrictions during labor is going to be very traumatic for many women,” Midwives Australia spokesperson Marie Heath told CNET.

Afterward, much of the support system and community built around helping new parents is gone because people are staying home, family members are cut off, and doctors often don’t have the resources or time to help.

Grandparents aren’t even supposed to hug their new grandchildren.

“I sometimes feel like something has been stolen from us,” Joanne, a woman who gave birth to her daughter two weeks ago, told CNET. “The normal experience just isn’t going to happen. I won’t be able to go and meet other new mums for coffee, I can’t take the baby to meet friends and family like you’re supposed to do.”

The challenges of the pandemic have left Joanne, her husband Andrew, and other new parents who spoke to CNET, feeling a bit lost.

“It’s weird. There are strictly no visitors allowed in the hospital,” Jason, a new dad, told CNET. “Partners only. They’ve stopped doing all their usual classes to help new parents learn how to live with a baby.”

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In the areas hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, hospitals are facing a dire ventilator shortage.

In Italy, doctors have already had to turn patients away because they didn’t have enough ventilators to treat them, and the same could soon happen in the U.S. if hospitals are overwhelmed by coronavirus patients.

To make up for the shortage, some resourceful doctors have suggested splitting ventilators, a poorly-understood means of attaching and dividing new hoses so that one ventilator could theoretically treat four patients. But now the American Society of Anesthesiologists has a dire warning: it’s impossible to safely split a ventilator, and doing so would put all four COVID-19 patients at risk.

The warning, which was issued Thursday jointly with five other medical associations like The Society of Critical Care Medicine and the American Association for Respiratory Care, specifically warned that it’s impossible to safely split a ventilator and still provide quality care to the any of the patients using it.

“The physiology of patients with COVID?19?onset acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is complex,” the warning reads.

“Attempting to ventilate multiple patients with COVID?19,” it continues, “could lead to poor outcomes and high mortality rates for all patients cohorted.”

Instead of trying to intubate as many patients as possible, the medical associations argue that doctors will have to make the exceptionally difficult choice of prioritizing patients based on who’s most likely to pull through.

“In accordance with the exceedingly difficult, but not uncommon, triage decisions often made in medical crises,” the warning concludes, “it is better to purpose the ventilator to the patient most likely to benefit than fail to prevent, or even cause, the demise of multiple patients.”

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Underwater Quarantine

The crew of a nuclear missile-equipped submarine belonging to the Russian Navy is in quarantine over concerns they have been exposed to the coronavirus, according to The Drive.

A civilian contractor who came on board as part of a business trip had come into contact with somebody who tested positive for COVID-19, local news portal B-port reported. In response, Navy officials chose to put the entire crew into quarantine.

Depth Charge

It’s still unclear how many crew members are now under quarantine, but as The Drive points out, these types of submarines typically have a crew of around 110.

Russian news agency TASS reported over the weekend that “more than 3,700 Russian military personnel have been tested for coronavirus with all results coming back negative.”

Air Carrier

Russia’s military isn’t the only one feeling the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

US Navy officials have also warned that a COVID-19 outbreak on the cramped quarters of aircraft carriers could be extremely dangerous. Navy officials confirmed to CNN last week that an increasing number of sailors on board the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier were testing positive for the virus.

“We are in the process now of testing 100 percent of the crew of that ship to ensure that we’re able to contain whatever spread might’ve occurred,” acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly told reporters last week at a Pentagon briefing, as quoted by CNN.

READ MORE: Entire Crew Of A Russian Nuclear Submarine Is In Quarantine After COVID-19 Exposure [The Drive]

More on submarines: The US Navy Wants to Arm Nuclear Submarines With Laser Cannons

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Russia Quarantines Nuclear Sub Crew After Coronavirus Exposure

German researchers are suggesting that “immunity passports” could be given out to workers who have already caught the coronavirus — meaning they’re now immune — in a bid to get them back to work and help speed up the return to normal society.

A mass study being planned by Germany’s public health body and a number of research groups and hospitals, The Guardian reports, will involve testing blood samples from 100,000 people for coronavirus antibodies, starting in mid-April.

The presence of antibodies in the blood indicates that the body is capable of fighting the virus — and is likely indicative that a subject was once a carrier. Such a test is inherently different than those being used right now to tell if somebody has the virus at the time of testing or not.

The idea is to give those who have these antibodies an “immunity passport” and allow them to get back to work. Once “herd immunity” is achieved in certain areas, governments could start easing restrictions in larger swathes of the country.

But before the government can start handing these passes out, there’s still one key question that needs to be answered: once a patient has successfully fought off the virus, are they really immune in the long term? As The Guardian points out, contracting SARS didn’t guarantee immunity beyond approximately a year after infection.

But experts are hopeful.

“It could be that this coronavirus causes a pretty robust immune response, which is durable and protective for much longer, maybe a year or even five years, but we don’t know because it’s a new virus,” a member of the UK government’s respiratory virus threats advisory group told The Guardian.

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“Immunity Passports” Could Help Society Get Back to Normal

Sharp Shooter

A sharpshooter on Reddit posted a pretty incredible snapshot to the Space subreddit over the weekend: The International Space Station, as seen from his backyard on Saturday night.

Eye in the Sky

The user, who goes by 120decibel, explained that he nabbed the shot using what sounds like a relatively expensive telescoping rig (upwards of $7,000, according to another user’s estimate), and manually tracked the ISS in the night sky with a viewfinder (as it moves a a pretty fast clip — at about 17,500 MPH).

Cash Me Outside

You might not have a $7,000 telescoping rig and enough experience to nail thing thing in a viewfinder tonight, but according to another user on the same post, it’s not impossible to see it with the naked eye, explaining that it “looks like a bright star about 30 degrees above the horizon that crosses about a quarter of the sky” and lasts for two minutes.

They go on: “It can very easily be missed or mistaken for a plane. Good passes can be brighter than… any other planet or star in the night sky and just barely below the limit to see during the day.”

If you want to give it a shot yourself, they pointed us to Heavens Above, where you can find a list of visible ISS passes for the next few weeks, here.

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This Guy Took a Photo of the ISS from His Backyard