New story in Science and Health from Time: NASA Found More Water On the Moon—But Don’t Plan On Having a Sip Any Time Soon NASA Found More Water On the Moon—But Don’t Plan On Having a Sip Any Time Soon

The permanently shadowed craters at the moon’s south pole are both the first and last place lunar astronauts would want to spend their time. The appeal is that they have generous deposits of water ice, a critical resource for any potential lunar base (ice means drinking water, yes, but it also means oxygen that can be used for synthesizing atmosphere and hydrogen for rocket fuel). But then there’s that business of the permanent shadows. It gets awfully cold on an airless body if there’s no sunlight—about -250º C (-418º F), in this case—and working in permanent darkness is no easy business, either.

It would be a lot handier if there were significant amounts of water on what amounts to the more temperate parts of the moon: the near and far sides where any one spot is brilliantly lit for two full weeks out of every month. Well, good news: NASA announced today that it has discovered water in just such a site: Clavius Crater, located between 50 and 75 degrees latitude in the southern lunar hemisphere on the near side of the moon.

“Water is extremely critical for deep space exploration,” said Jacob Bleacher, NASA’s chief scientist for human exploration and operations, at a Monday press conference. “We know that it exists in some of the darkest and coldest craters, so finding it in places that are easier to reach is very helpful for future exploration.”

The new discovery was made by the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a 2.7 meter (9 ft.) telescope mounted inside a retrofitted Boeing 747, which flies at altitudes of 13,700 m (45,000 ft). That’s above 99.9% of atmospheric water vapor—helpful, as even a little vapor blocks some frequencies, leaving earthbound telescopes blind in certain parts of the infrared spectrum. In this case, widening that frequency aperture revealed a lot.

NASAThis image highlights the Moon’s Clavius Crater with an illustration depicting water trapped in the lunar soil there, along with an image of NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) that found sunlit lunar water.

Observatories have previously detected hydrogen’s chemical fingerprint in the lunar “regolith,” or soil. The assumption was that it was in the form of hydroxyl, which is made of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom—a stable molecule that would naturally form in a regolith where oxygen is also present. It was at least theoretically possible that there were two atoms of hydrogen—meaning H2O, or water—but earth-based telescopes can’t detect that. SOFIA can, and over the course of two years of observations, the NASA team hit the molecular jackpot, finding the precise fingerprint of water scattered across Clavius.

But future astronauts may not be able to get at the newly discovered lunar water so easily. For one thing, it’s scarce—about 100 to 400 parts per million, the equivalent of 0.35 liters (12 oz.) of water in a cubic meter of lunar soil. Moreover, the water molecules are not interacting with one another in ways that would produce a discrete quantity of ice or water. Instead, they are formed by violent collisions of micrometeorites. Those collisions provide the heat to convert hydroxyl molecules to water molecules, but those molecules are then entrained within microscopically small glass beads also created by the collisions.

“If the water is trapped in glass beads, it might require too much energy to extract it,” said Bleacher. What’s more, once the molecules are freed, they might disperse or be destroyed. “Are we going to be disruptive to the water to the point that we just can’t use it?” asked Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division.

The scarcity of the water and the difficulty of the extraction might simply drive astronauts back to those shadowed craters—which are currently the target spots for NASA’s plans to have Americans back on the moon by 2024, via the Artemis program. But that doesn’t mean the SOFIA findings are merely of academic value. Finding water in one unexpected lunar site means it could well be in plenty of others. Every place it’s detected simply widens the potential footprint for future human exploration—and even, perhaps, settlement.

New story in Science and Health from Time: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Probe Punched an Asteroid in the Name of Science. Here’s What the Mission Could Teach Us NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Probe Punched an Asteroid in the Name of Science. Here’s What the Mission Could Teach Us

There is absolutely nothing inherently special about the asteroid Bennu. A loosely-packed agglomeration of dust and rock about as big across as the Empire State Building and currently 322 million km (200 million mi.) from Earth as it orbits the sun, it is just one of about a million asteroids that astronomers have identified and catalogued. But on Tuesday, Bennu became the most famous asteroid in the solar system, after NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made contact with it for a dramatic six seconds to blast loose and collect a sample.

“I must have watched about a hundred times last night,” said Dante Lauretta, the missions’s principal investigator, during a press conference yesterday, while talking about a video clip recorded by the probe during its harrowing maneuver, seen below. “We really did make a mess on the surface of this asteroid, but it’s a good mess.”

NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

Asteroids are more than just space debris—they are some of the oldest, most pristine samples known of the early solar system. Studying their elemental composition can yield clues to planetary formation, cosmic chemistry and even the emergence of life on Earth. But first you’ve got to get a sample of them, and that’s where OSIRIS-REx—for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer—comes in.

The SUV-sized OSIRIS-REx launched in 2016, arriving at Bennu two years later. It went into orbit around the asteroid, studying it in search of a smooth spot with loose soil and few boulders, making sample collection both easy and safe. But NASA investigators almost immediately realized they were out of luck—Bennu’s surface is almost nothing but boulders. Mission planners hoped for a target site hundreds of feet across, but they settled on one in a region near the asteroid’s north pole that they dubbed Nightingale Crater, which measures just 8 m (26 ft).

Collecting a sample from so small a spot would require both smart technology and deft flying. OSIRIS-REx has a 3.3 meter long, three-jointed arm, at the end of which is a circular sample collector about 0.3 m across dubbed TAGSAM—for Touch and Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism. The flight plan called for the spacecraft to extend its sample arm and then descend from orbit, slowing its speed to just 10 cm/second (0.2 mph) until the TAGSAM assembly made contact with the surface. At that point, nitrogen bottles in the TAGSAM would fire, blasting loose soil and rocks and forcing them into a collection chamber. After just a few seconds, the spacecraft would execute the go part of the touch-and-go maneuver, backing away with its sample secured.

That’s the way it was supposed to go—and that’s exactly the way it did go. TAGSAM was in contact with the surface of Bennu for six seconds, and collected material for five—the greatest share within the first three seconds. It took 18.5 minutes for the signal that the maneuver was a success to travel the 322 million km to Earth. Only once it arrived did NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine release a triumphal statement.

“This amazing first for NASA demonstrates how an incredible team from across the country came together and persevered,” he said. “Our industry, academic, and international partners have made it possible to hold a piece of the most ancient solar system in our hands.”

The question is, how big is that piece? The TAGSAM collector can accommodate up to 2 kg (4.4 lbs) of material; mission leaders want at least about 60 gm (2.1 oz). Later today, the collector arm will move to put the TAGSAM in front of one of the spacecraft’s cameras, thus giving NASA engineers a better look. A more accurate measurement will be taken on Saturday, when the collector arm is extended and the spacecraft’s thrusters nudge it into a gentle pirouette. The rate at which it spins from a given amount of thrust will be compared to the rate of spin from the same maneuver conducted before Tuesday’s collection; the more material gathered, the slower the rate of spin will now be. If there’s enough material, the sample will be transferred to a secure reentry capsule, which will be the only part of OSIRIS-REx that will ultimately return to the surface of the Earth.

“We will use the combination of data from…the post-TAG images and mass measurement to assess our confidence that we have collected at least 60 grams of sample,” said project manager Rich Burns in a statement. “If our confidence is high, we’ll make the decision to stow the sample on October 30.”

If their confidence is not high, the team can execute another collection maneuver on Jan.. 12 at a site known as Osprey. Departure from Bennu is set for March 21, with the reentry capsule set to parachute into the Utah desert on Sept. 24, 2023. Only then will the little bit of rock and dirt from the seven-year, $800 million mission be in the hands of the scientists. And only then will we begin to reveal the secrets that Bennu may hold.

New story in Science and Health from Time: UK Plans ‘Challenge Trials,’ Which Will Intentionally Give People COVID-19 to Test Vaccines UK Plans ‘Challenge Trials,’ Which Will Intentionally Give People COVID-19 to Test Vaccines

On Oct. 20, researchers at the Imperial College of London announced plans for the first human challenge study of COVID-19, which involves deliberately infecting volunteers with the virus that causes the disease, in order to test the effectiveness of vaccines.

The strategy is controversial, as researchers have to weigh the risks of infection against the benefits of learning how well the various vaccine candidates can fight that infection. The strongest argument in favor of the studies has to do with time. If cases of COVID-19 are waning, then the likelihood that people who are vaccinated would get exposed to and potentially infected with the virus naturally declines as well, and it takes researchers longer to accumulate enough data to tell if a vaccine is effective or not. By intentionally exposing people to the virus after they have been vaccinated, researchers can shrink this timeline significantly.

Scientists have used the model to test vaccines against a number of different diseases, including the very first one against smallpox—Edward Jenner infected his son with cowpox, and then exposed his son to smallpox as a way to test his theory that exposure to the former would protect his son from infection by the latter. Scientists tested an H1N1 influenza vaccine by exposing people to the flu, and did the same with a cholera vaccine and the bacterium that causes it. But the strategy requires a solid base of information about both the disease and the vaccine in order to justify the risks. More recently, for example, scientists considered intentionally infecting volunteers with the Zika virus to test vaccines against that disease, but ultimately decided they didn’t have enough data to justify the risk.

Adair Richards, honorary associate professor at the University of Warwick who last May published guidelines on how to ethically conduct human challenge studies, notes that during a pandemic, the risk of delays in developing treatments should be considered alongside the risks to volunteers who are intentionally exposed to disease. “There is a moral weight to inaction as well as action,” he says. “There is an unseen risk if we don’t do [these studies]. We send a lot of doctors, nurses and care workers to work every day, and some will get really sick and die of COVID-19 in the next few weeks. [Those] few weeks count—that’s the unseen risk.”

More than 38,000 people in the U.S. agree, and have registered their intention to volunteer for challenge studies on 1DaySooner.org, an online recruiting group—despite the fact that no such studies have been planned in the country yet.

The London-based scientists still need to submit a detailed proposal to regulatory agencies on how they could conduct their study. If the proposal is approved, the team won’t start exposing any volunteers until January. Before that, they will first need to determine what dose of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is safe to give to people but can still produce enough disease to test a vaccine. They will start with the smallest possible dose and work up to one that balances safety with the ability to trigger a proper immune response. The participants will remain under quarantine at a designated facility in London until they test negative for the virus, the researchers said.

From a scientific perspective, infecting people with a known dose of the virus can help researchers be more precise about evaluating and comparing people’s immune responses to different vaccines. It will also provide those answers faster than waiting for people to be exposed naturally infected with the disease. “These could almost take the place of phase 3 trials or at least go alongside them,” says Richards.

That speed is one reason why the 1DaySooner.org volunteers have supported human challenge trials. “We could know already if some of the major vaccines in phase 3 trials are actually effective,” says the movement’s founder Josh Morrison, who also co-founded Waitlist Zero, and advocacy group for living organ donors. “It’s not to say that we wouldn’t still need phase 3 studies, but we would obviously be in a much better position if we could say that when we vaccinate healthy young people with this vaccine and then challenge them with virus, it’s 80% effective or 60% effective or 20% effective or not effective at all. It’s useful information we could have now but don’t have.”

Exposing people deliberately to a disease-causing virus, however, would only make sense if the chances of naturally being infected is low, and would delay results of vaccine trials. That’s one issue regulators in the UK will likely consider before approving the plan, as daily case numbers there continue to climb. That’s also the case in the U.S., where new infections continue to emerge at high rates in many parts of the country. That’s one of the main reasons that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said earlier this year that the studies are not ethically justified—at the time, mid-July, daily case numbers were peaking.

In an Oct. 20 statement to TIME, NIAID officials said the agency is “currently prioritizing randomized controlled clinical trials to evaluate the safety and efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates. Should there be a need for human challenge studies to fully assess candidate vaccines or therapeutics for SARS-CoV-2, NIAID has begun efforts to manufacture a virus strain that could be used to develop a human challenge model, if needed, although human challenge trials would not replace Phase 3 trials.”

Any human challenge study has to be done with extreme caution, says Richards. His guidelines include giving people a mandatory period of time to think about their decision to ensure they are making the choice freely and without any duress, and that the risks of infection are conveyed in a straightforward and easily understandable way. Any financial payment should be minimal to cover time away from work and any expenses related to being quarantined for the study, but not large enough to bias people’s decisions. “We also want participants to be screened for mental health conditions and cognitive capacity,” he says, to ensure that they are making their decision to join the study autonomously.

The Imperial College of London team has yet to detail how its study volunteers will be managed, and what type of informed consent they will provide, but the announcement could change the discussion about the feasibility and utility of human challenge studies. Having studies that compare people’s immune responses to different vaccines could be useful in prioritizing which vaccines are manufactured in greater quantities. “Even if every vaccine currently in phase 3 trials works very well, we won’t be able to produce enough doses to vaccinate the whole world in 2021,” says Morrison. “It’s important that we are getting better vaccines and learning from the science and challenge studies are going to be quite useful for that.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: The Antarctic Ocean Is in Climate Crisis. This Week, the World Could Take a Big Step Towards Protecting Its Future The Antarctic Ocean Is in Climate Crisis. This Week, the World Could Take a Big Step Towards Protecting Its Future

Sixty years ago a dozen nations, including arch-rivals the United States and the Soviet Union, agreed to preserve the Antarctic continent as a place of peace, research and conservation. Commercial exploitation of its resources and its animals was forbidden. Yet much of the ocean that surrounds the territory does not have the same protections.

This will be up for discussion during a virtual meeting of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) from 22-30 October. The Convention is meeting to discuss the region’s future and will decide whether or not it’s time to give some of the most biodiverse seas around Antarctica the same defenses as the land itself.

The timing couldn’t be more vital. The combined threats of global climate change and industrial fishing are weakening the crucial ecosystems that lie within its waters. Record high temperatures are breaking up ice sheets that have lasted millennia. On Feb. 6, a weather station on the Antarctic Peninsula—the 1,500 km long finger of land that reaches towards South America—reported a record temperature high of 18.3°C. While members of a nearby scientific expedition researching penguin populations relished in the balmy weather, stripping down to t-shirts and bare chests, it was an ominous sign for a species better adapted to ice. Just a few days earlier the penguin researchers were reporting a 77% decline in some colonies.

The peninsula isn’t just one of the fastest warming places on earth. It’s also home to some of the most exquisitely specialized species on the planet. Among them is Antarctic krill—the tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans that collectively form the largest biomass on the planet and are the cornerstone of the global ocean food chain. Yet the encroachment of industrial fisheries into these waters is threatening their health, as well as the penguins, seals and whales that are sustained by them.

Read More: Why This Year Is Our Last, Best Chance for Saving the Oceans

CCAMLR was established in 1982 with a mandate to protect Antarctic marine life through sustainable fisheries. It governs by consensus, and regulates fishing through quotas. The current quota for krill across the entire fishing fleet is limited to less than .5% of the known biomass. That may not sound like much, but it can still have an outsize impact depending on where the krill is harvested, says Rodolfo Werner, an Argentina-based marine biologist who is currently advising the Pew Charitable Trust’s Antarctic Krill Conservation Project.

“The question is not how much krill you catch, but when you catch it and where,” Werner says. Over the past decade, he says, the fishing fleets have been moving closer to areas around the Antarctic Peninsula that are used by penguins to forage during the breeding season. Seals and whales also compete for krill along those coasts, leading to even greater uncertainty about how much, exactly, is there. “It’s hard enough trying to determine how much krill we can allow the fisheries to take,” he says by phone. “When you throw in climate change and sea ice reduction, it gets even more complicated.”

Rather than work by quotas, he says, a better solution would be to limit fishing access entirely in vital areas. And he is not the only one. The European Union, along with most other CCAMLR members, is calling for the entire Antarctic Peninsula —the northernmost tip of the sprawling continent— to be set aside as a Marine Protected Area (MPA), meaning that the area will be off limits for all kinds of commercial exploitation. The call is part of a global drive to set aside a full 30% of the oceans as conservation areas, where fish stocks and marine animals can recover from decades of overfishing, and go on to repopulate the rest of the ocean. Marine conservationist Cristina Mittermeier calls them “fish banks,” that grow with compound interest over time.

In 2011 CCAMLR committed to establish a network of nine large-scale marine protected areas around Antarctica. A decade later, only two have been implemented, including one at the Ross Sea that is twice the area of Texas and the largest such region in the world. This year the organization will consider a proposal by Argentina and Chile to create an MPA to protect a large section of the Antarctic Peninsula region, along with one for East Antarctica and another for the Weddell Sea.

The problem is that up until now, CCAMLR members Russia and China have blocked the proposals. Both countries are intent on expanding their regional fishing operations, and while MPAs won’t affect their quota, “China doesn’t want any restriction on access to resources anywhere,” says Werner, who has served on CCAMLR’s scientific committee for the past 17 years. “Setting up an MPA in Antarctica sets a precedent that could be replicated elsewhere on the high seas, and they see that as a threat to their sovereignty.”

What happens on this remote continent will reverberate around the world, says Andrea Kavanagh, project director for the Pew Charitable Trust’s Protecting Antarctica’s Southern Ocean campaign. An MPA on its own can’t stop the impact of warming seas or plastic pollution, but by offering marine life respite from fishing pressures, it helps build resilience.

“Designating the Antarctic Peninsula MPA would create a climate refuge for krill and penguins and could permanently protect the region’s unique marine ecosystem,” says Kavanagh. Not only that, it can help mitigate the effects of climate change. When krill feed on phytoplankton, their carbon-rich waste sinks to the bottom of the ocean, where it stays for thousands of years. Scientists estimate that they sequester some 23 million tons of carbon emissions each year, equivalent to the output of six coal-fired power plants.

Together, the East Antarctica, Antarctic Peninsula, and Weddell Sea MPAs would protect close to 1% of the ocean globally by covering approximately four million square kilometers. “Establishing this network of MPAs could be the single greatest act of ocean conservation in humankind, making this the greatest sanctuary on earth,” says Mittermeier, whose organization SeaLegacy.Org is leading a petition campaign in support of the MPAs. “If we can’t protect the most wild place on the planet, how can we protect ourselves?”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Russian-U.S. Crew Launches on Fast Track to the Space Station Russian-U.S. Crew Launches on Fast Track to the Space Station

(MOSCOW) — A trio of space travelers has launched successfully to the International Space Station, for the first time using a fast-track maneuver to reach the orbiting outpost in just three hours.

NASA’s Kate Rubins along with Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos lifted off as scheduled Wednesday morning from the Russia-leased Baikonur space launch facility in Kazakhstan for a six-month stint on the station.

For the first time, they are trying a two-orbit, three-hour approach to the orbiting space outpost. Previously it took twice as long for the crews to reach the station.

They will join the station’s NASA commander, Chris Cassidy, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, who have been aboard the complex since April and are scheduled to return to Earth in a week.

Speaking during Tuesday’s pre-launch news conference at Baikonur, Rubins emphasized that the crew spent weeks in quarantine at the Star City training facility outside Moscow and then on Baikonur to avoid any threat from the coronavirus.

“We spent two weeks at Star City and then 17 days at Baikonur in a very strict quarantine,” Rubins said. “During all communications with crew members, we were wearing masks. We made PCR tests twice and we also made three times antigen fast tests.”

She said she was looking forward to scientific experiments planned for the mission.

“We’re planning to try some really interesting things like bio-printing tissues and growing cells in space and, of course, continuing our work on sequencing DNA,” Rubins said.

Ryzhikov, who will be the station’s skipper, said the crew will try to pinpoint the exact location of a leak at a station’s Russian section that has slowly leaked oxygen. The small leak hasn’t posed any immediate danger to the crew.

“We will take with us additional equipment which will allow us to detect the place of this leak more precisely,” he told reporters. “We will also take with us additional improved hermetic material which will allow to fix the leak.”

In November, Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov are set to greet NASA’s SpaceX first operational Crew Dragon mission, bringing NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi to the space station aboard the Crew Dragon vehicle. It follows a successful Demo-2 mission earlier this year.

The Crew Dragon mission was pushed back from Oct. 31 into November, and no new date has been set yet. The delay is intended to give SpaceX more time to conduct tests and review data from an aborted Falcon 9 launch earlier this month.

New story in Science and Health from Time: ‘It’s a Game for Them.’ Scientists Around the World Are Teaching Dogs to Sniff Out COVID-19 ‘It’s a Game for Them.’ Scientists Around the World Are Teaching Dogs to Sniff Out COVID-19

Steve Lindsay, a public health entomologist at Durham University, is midway through explaining how dogs might play a role in detecting COVID-19 infections when a decidedly less-well trained canine interrupts our conversation.

“If you’ll excuse me for a minute, I’ve got a naughty black Labrador out in the back garden doing something it shouldn’t be doing,” Lindsay says. He disappears. I hear barking. He returns accompanied by a chocolate lab. “She’s not as skilled as the detection dogs,” Lindsay says as the pup tries to lick his face. “But it’s really interesting to see how a dog sees the world through its nose. It’s amazing actually.”

It’s that olfactory prowess that could make dogs a useful ally in our battle against a virus that’s killed over 1 million people worldwide. Scientists have long known that people sick with certain diseases emit particular odors—different infections affect different parts of the body in different ways, often producing specific combinations of volatile compounds. Dogs have shown a remarkable ability to pick up on those airborne chemicals, detecting when people are infected with malaria, infectious bacteria, and even certain types of cancer. Now scientists are hoping that dogs’ keen sense of smell, 10,000 times better than that of humans, can help them identify people carrying COVID-19, too.

Lindsay, along with collaborators at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the U.K.-based nonprofit Medical Detection Dogs, is working on a U.K. government-funded study that will test dogs’ ability to detect COVID-19. Their goal: to train coronavirus-sniffing dogs, which could then be deployed at schools, airports and other public venues to reinforce existing nasal swab testing programs. A similar study is underway at the University of Pennsylvania.

“We’re not just doing the proof of concept work, we’re also working out actively how to deploy this and scale it up as well, because we want to hit the ground running once we’ve gotten our results,” says James Logan, the head of LSHTM’s Department of Disease Control and the project lead on the U.K. study.

Other studies have produced promising, albeit early, results. In June, a team in France using a small number of samples collected from human patients who had been tested for COVID-19 in PCR tests (the current gold standard for testing) found a high degree of evidence that dogs could detect COVID-19 infections through differences in the smell of human subjects’ armpit sweat. (Also concluded: dogs don’t particularly mind sniffing people’s armpits.) In Germany, researchers ran a small pilot study, published in July, with trained coronavirus-sniffing dogs—corona-schnüffelnder hunde—and showed that the dogs were able to distinguish between coronavirus-positive samples and a control group with an average sensitivity (the rate of detecting true positives) of 83% and a specificity (true negative rate) of 96% after only one week of training. That’s not quite as accurate as COVID-19 rapid antigen tests, which have a sensitivity ranging from 84% to nearly 98% and specificities of 100%. But antigen tests require often uncomfortable nasal swabs, and take about 15 minutes to return results. Dogs, by contrast, may be able to tell if a person is infected in seconds, no swab needed.

“It’s a game for them,” says Holger Volk, a co-author on the German study and the head of small-animal medicine and surgery at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Hannover. In that study, researchers used a device called a Detection Dog Training System, which randomly presented dogs with either COVID-19 positive or negative samples via a row of seven “scent holes” connected to sample containers. The dogs were automatically rewarded with a toy or food when they identified the correct samples. “It’s a positive experience for the dogs as well, and that’s why they learn so fast,” says Volk.

Coronavirus sniffing dogs are already in use at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport as part of a Finnish government-sponsored pilot program; canines are also currently scanning for COVID-19 in multiple airports in the U.A.E. Despite those deployments, there’s still plenty we don’t know about dogs’ ability to detect COVID-19. It remains unclear how strong any coronavirus odor smells to dogs, for instance. If sniffer dogs are sensitive to coronavirus smells, handlers could keep the animals near moving lines of people, checking lots of subjects at once—similar to how explosive-sniffing dogs work at airports. If not, sniffer dogs may only be able to pick up the scent when scanning people one at a time. Another unknown: how far a COVID-19 infection needs to progress before a dog can pick up the scent. The German study, for instance, used samples from hospitalized coronavirus patients, who were likely sicker than many people who get infected; about 40% of people with the virus show no symptoms, but may still spread it to others.

“What we want particularly is for our dogs to be picking up asymptomatic people,” says Lindsay, whose study aims to test dogs’ abilities on people presenting various degrees of symptoms. “If they do that, that’s even better because we’ll pick up people early.”

Another open question is whether dogs trained to detect COVID-19 are zeroing in on the infection caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus specifically, or if they’re detecting a broader array of similar viral infections, like seasonal flu and colds. “Like a recipe, if you get one ingredient wrong it doesn’t give you the right taste,” says Logan. His team wants to answer that question in further research, assuming they get more funding.

While researchers are optimistic that dogs may play some role in helping fight the pandemic, they’re clear-eyed about the need for more evidence that such a plan will actually work. “There are a number of projects around the world that are moving forward with deploying COVID-19 dogs, and this is happening a little bit before the robust evidence is in place,” says Claire Guest, the CEO of Medical Detection Dogs. Getting more conclusive results will mean collecting hundreds of samples to make sure dogs are learning the scent of COVID-19 infection and not just the smell of individual patients. That sometimes means getting creative; the U.K-based research team is currently collecting socks worn by COVID-19 positive patients and others worn by healthy participants to use in its trials. Guest hopes her group will be ready to publish results based on this next research phase in the next six to eight weeks. If their findings check out, researchers say we could see COVID-19 detection dogs deployed more widely within six months.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Camera Designed by Felix & Paul Studios and TIME Arrives at ISS to Capture First-Ever Virtual Reality Spacewalk Camera Designed by Felix & Paul Studios and TIME Arrives at ISS to Capture First-Ever Virtual Reality Spacewalk

It’s entirely possible you missed it, but on Oct. 2 at 9:16 PM ET, you lifted off for the International Space Station. Just over two days later, you docked successfully—and it’s a good thing you did. You’ve got a spacewalk planned for later this year.

O.K., technically speaking, you didn’t go anywhere at all, and unless you’re actually a highly-trained astronaut, you certainly shouldn’t be planning for a real-deal spacewalk—or extravehicular activity (EVA)—any time soon. But you could very much share in the experience when actual ISS crew members venture outside of the station for one of the most exciting and dangerous experiences an astronaut can have.

That’s because something special was included among the ISS-bound cargo on the uncrewed Cygnus supply vehicle that took off from Wallops Island, Va. earlier this week: the first-ever 3D, virtual reality camera designed to operate in the vacuum of space. It’s the product of a partnership between the Montreal-based Felix & Paul Studios (an Emmy Award-winning creator of immersive entertainment experiences), TIME Studios (TIME’s Emmy Award-winning television and film division) and Nanoracks (the leading provider of commercial space access).

Philip Andrews—for TIMEThis photograph was taken inside the mobile clean room attached to Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket as it rests atop Pad 0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops, Island, Va. on Sept. 28, 2020. Mechanical Technician Stephen Busch, left, and Jennie Wang, Lead Integration and Test Mechanical Engineer for Northrop Grumman, load the cargo bag containing the Space Camera through the hatch of the Cygnus Pressurized Cargo Module. The vehicle successfully docked with the International Space Station on October 5.

The new camera is not the first one TIME, Felix & Paul and Nanoracks have sent to the ISS. In 2016, TIME and Felix & Paul were independently exploring the possibility of such a project, and ultimately decided to collaborate rather than compete. The decision bore fruit when, just two years later when we launched a camera built to operate inside the ISS. It’s been shooting scenes of station life for TIME’s The ISS Experience, set for release on Oct. 22 for virtual reality headsets via the Oculus Store. The episodes will also be available later in the fall in select domes and planetariums around the country, and in 360° mobile format through 5G-enabled wireless carriers.

Designing a multi-lens camera that could shoot in 3D and VR and function in the microgravity of low-Earth orbit was challenge enough. Designing one that can function in the extreme environment outside the ship—where temperatures fluctuate from 121º C (250º F) to -156º C (-250º F), and where 16 sunrises and sunsets a day can produce extreme flaring on the camera’s lenses—was an order of magnitude harder.

The camera was hardened by Nanoracks to withstand not only the temperature variations and the solar flaring, but also ultraviolet radiation, charged particle (ionizing) radiation, plasma, surface charging and arcing, and impacts from micrometeoroids and orbital debris. “This may well be one of the most complex and exciting projects that we have ever worked on at Nanoracks,” says Conor Brown, senior manager of the company’s program office.

Adds Jonathan Woods, executive producer for The ISS Experience at TIME Studios and Emmy-winning producer of A Year in Space: “Getting this camera to space was the culmination of five years of exceedingly hard work. Only 228 humans have ever conducted a spacewalk. It’s one of the most thrilling yet perilous tasks an astronaut can undertake.”

The astronauts whose spacewalk will be recorded for The ISS Experience will not have to worry about managing the camera themselves. Instead it will be mounted on the Canadarm 2, the station’s 17.6 m (58 ft) remote manipulator arm that can be operated by astronauts within the station, capturing the experience of those who are working outside. TIME will provide updates on when the first EVA to be filmed will take place, and when the footage will be released for viewing. The experience should be a profound one.

“Our space camera,” says Félix Lajeunesse, co-founder of Felix & Paul Studios, “purpose-built to capture this historic event in fully-immersive 3D, brings us one step closer to our goal of taking billions of minds to space, and having them experience a spacewalk as if they were astronauts themselves.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Why Pence and Harris Couldn’t Stop Talking About Fracking During the Vice Presidential Debate Why Pence and Harris Couldn’t Stop Talking About Fracking During the Vice Presidential Debate

The moderator of Wednesday’s vice presidential debate hadn’t even brought up climate change when current Vice President Mike Pence jumped into the topic. But instead of talking about the science of the issue or offering a plan to address it, he sought to portray former Vice President Joe Biden’s climate stance as a radical ploy that would destroy the economy.

“They want to bury our economy under a $2 trillion Green New Deal,” Pence said when asked about how the U.S. would recover economically from the pandemic. “[They] want to abolish fossil fuels, and ban fracking, which would cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs all across the heartland.” The statement was misleading at best. Biden hasn’t proposed banning fracking, and doesn’t have the ability to do so. Nor does he have a plan to abolish fossil fuels in the near term.

But what’s perhaps more significant about Pence’s statement is that it signals the rise of climate change as a key issue in the presidential contest. In a race filled with dramatic twists and turns, the discussion about climate change on display Wednesday was notable for how closely it hewed to talking points and represented the back and forth on the issue playing out in both parties’ campaigning across the country, and particularly in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

In recent years, as extreme weather has intensified and scientists have sounded alarm bells, climate change has risen on the list of Democratic Party priorities. The issue ranked as a top issue alongside health care in the Democratic primary, and polling suggests that Democratic voters continue to rank it as a top concern even amid the ongoing public health and economic crises. Biden responded with an aggressive plan to stem emissions and eliminate the U.S. carbon footprint by 2050.

The rise of climate change as a top-tier political issue has left Republicans in a bind. Many Republicans now recognize climate change as a real issue, and the long-time strategy of casting doubt on the science no longer works. Still, many Republicans refuse to embrace significant climate measures, in large part because of the fossil-fuel industry’s strong and persistent lobby in Washington. So, instead, many Republicans have sought to portray climate action as unaffordable. The “vast majority of Americans” understand that climate change is happening, John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s top pollsters, told the podcast Climate 2020 last year. But “they don’t want to lose their jobs over this and they don’t want to pay a lot of money.”

The Green New Deal, a resolution introduced by Congressional Democrats in 2019 that calls for bold public spending to address climate change and other social ills, has become the center around which partisan arguments have churned. Republicans have claimed that the resolution would ban cows and planes, among other things, and that it would cost $90 trillion. (Needless to say, these claims are both false and outlandish). In response, Biden has tread carefully, calling the congressional resolution a “crucial framework,” but stressing that he has his own, different plan. (He’s priced that plan at $2 trillion).

The Republican strategy of trying to pillory Biden for the Green New Deal was on full display Wednesday. Asked about the economy, Pence pivoted to the Green New Deal. Following criticism of the administration’s position on health care, Pence pivoted to the Green New Deal. Asked about the science of climate change, Pence pivoted to the Green New Deal.

Harris, who co-sponsored the congressional resolution, mostly dissembled on the question of how closely Biden’s climate plan hews to the Green New Deal, but she did push back hard against Pence’s claim that Biden would ban fracking. “I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking,” Harris said. “That is a fact.”

While most Americans want to see the federal government take action to address climate change, there are a range of views about what policies to implement. That’s particularly the case in places heavily dependent on fossil fuels, like parts of rural Pennsylvania, a swing state that could be decisive in the presidential race and is home to a sizable oil-and-gas industry presence that uses fracking to drill. “It’s how you get there that really creates the challenge in rural America,” Heidi Heitkamp, a former Democratic U.S. senator from North Dakota, told me on a panel hosted by D.C.-based think tank Third Way earlier this week. “If the Green New Deal means you get there by stopping all fracking, all development, you’re not going to buy into that” if you live in a part of the country that depends on the industry.

The Trump campaign has sought to make the climate issue all about fracking and the Green New Deal. In campaign visits to Pennsylvania, Trump himself has repeated the claim that Biden would ban fracking, and the President is currently running at least one campaign ad in the state seeking to drive that message home. In response, while on the ground in Pennsylvania, Biden has repeatedly told voters that he would not ban fracking and instead has sought to draw attention to his plan to create millions of clean energy jobs.

Harris made those points during the debate. “Joe Biden has been very clear that he thinks about growing jobs,” she said. “Part of those jobs that will be created by Joe Biden are going to be about clean energy and renewable energy.”

It’s not clear that the Trump campaign’s strategy to hammer Biden on fracking is actually resonating. Polling has shown that voters believe a transition to renewable energy will actually create jobs and the messaging has given Biden an opening to talk to Pennsylvanians about his actual plan.

Ahead of the debate, Michael Catanzaro, a former energy and environmental policy in the Trump White House, said that the Trump campaign sensed Biden was vulnerable on energy in Pennsylvania, but noted that the issue also provided an opening for Biden. “I think the [former] vice president has been on the defensive a bit,” on fracking, he said. “But I think it’s actually working for him. He’s coming out; he’s talking to union voters.”

And, for the voters who may have missed Biden’s fracking remarks on the campaign trail, Harris left no room for misinterpretation during Wednesday’s debate.

New story in Science and Health from Time: The 2020 Physics Nobel Winners Helped Us Better Understand the Universe’s Most Mysterious Phenomenon The 2020 Physics Nobel Winners Helped Us Better Understand the Universe’s Most Mysterious Phenomenon

An awful lot of time elapsed between the day Roger Penrose was walking to work in 1964 and the moment his phone rang while he was in the shower on the morning of Oct. 6, 2020. Back then, his walk was interrupted by “some strange feeling of elation,” as he told the Associated Press yesterday, about the moment he had his first glimmers of insight into the equations that would eventually make him famous. It was surely with another kind of elation that he answered his phone yesterday to learn that those same equations—which were the first to prove the existence of black holes—had earned the 89-year-old University of Oxford mathematical physicist the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Penrose was not alone alone in his delight. Also honored this year were astronomers Andrea Ghez, 55, of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Reinhard Genzel, 68, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, for their research on what, to humanity anyway, is the most important black hole of all: the supermassive Sagittarius A*, which sits at the center of the Milky Way.

“The discoveries of this year’s Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects,” said David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, in a statement that accompanied the announcement. “But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research.”

It was very much past research that earned Penrose his recognition—but research that was a prerequisite for much of the black hole science that followed. As with so many other insights into exotic physics, the road to Penrose’s work runs straight through Albert Einstein. In 1915, Einstein developed his theory of general relativity; the following year he postulated that the physics he had discovered could, at least in theory, support the idea of an exceedingly dense body—say, a collapsed star—with a gravitational pull so powerful not even light could escape. Within the maw of such an object—which was not yet known as a black hole—conventional physics and the very laws of nature as we know them would break down.

It was a nifty idea, but Einstein himself, who died in 1955, was not convinced that black holes existed. They made sense in the rarefied world of chalkboard equations, but in the far messier realm of the universe itself, the conditions might not exist to allow so tidy a stellar collapse. Nine years after Einstein’s death, Penrose took his walk to work and began contemplating “what it would be like to be in this situation where all this material is collapsing around you,” as he told the AP. “That’s a place where densities and curvatures go to infinity. You expect the physics to go crazy.”

Crazy maybe, but within a year, Penrose had set the physics straight, publishing a whole new collection of equations that put muscle on the theoretical bones Einstein had left, proving mathematically that black holes could exist in reality, not just as theories in the very big brains of very smart physicists.

“Penrose convinced physicists that black holes were tightly woven within Einstein’s mathematical tapestry,” Brian Greene, best-selling author and theoretical physicist at Columbia University, tells TIME. “Before his discovery, many imagined that black holes could only form in highly idealized conditions that might never occur in the real universe. Penrose took a mathematical sledgehammer to this possibility, establishing that in fairly commonplace circumstances, black holes—according to the math—should form. It has been nearly half-a-century since these breakthroughs and so this recognition is both well deserved and long overdue.”

Ghez’s and Genzel’s work is decidedly more recent, but even they started a while back, independently investigating Sagittarius A* as long ago as the mid-1990s. Back then the nature—even the existence—of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way was in doubt. Instead, as the Nobel Committee put it in its commendation, the best astronomers could say was that there was “an extremely heavy, invisible object that pulls on [a] jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds.” Not exactly conclusive stuff.

The two researchers quickly established themselves as competitors—Ghez conducting her research with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, Genzel using the European Southern Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Slowly, both began to peel back the mysteries of Sagittarius A*. Infrared imaging allowed them to penetrate some of the haze of dust and gas that obscures the black hole. Closer to home, they had to contend with the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere. They overcame that issue first with something known as speckle imaging—essentially short-exposure snapshots that freeze images in place. Later they used adaptive optics that rely on distortion-correcting mirrors.

Ultimately, their competition led to shared rewards, as the pair successfully observed the paths of thousands of stars circling the galactic center, precisely plotting the orbits of 30 of them. Their findings allowed them to take the measure of Sagittarius A*, calculating that it weighs about 4 million times the mass of the sun.

“Genzel and Ghez were the first to provide convincing observational evidence that black holes are really out there, and that a monstrous-sized one is at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy,” says Greene. “It was a heroic feat to peer at the center of our galaxy with such astonishing precision, establishing that Einstein’s math brightly illuminates reality.”

Ghez is distinguished for another reason too: she’s only the fourth woman since 1901 to be honored with the physics Nobel. More and more women are thriving in the head-cracking fields of astronomy and theoretical physics, but their work has been all too slow in being recognized. “Andrea Ghez is sure to inspire many girls to follow their passion for understanding the cosmos,” says Greene, “some of whom no doubt will one day follow her footsteps to Stockholm.” That, surely, will be a powerful human dividend of this year’s physics prizes. The scientific dividends already speak for themselves.

New story in Science and Health from Time: Siberia Burned. Arctic Ice Shrank. This Was the World’s Hottest September Ever Siberia Burned. Arctic Ice Shrank. This Was the World’s Hottest September Ever

Well, we’ve done it again. Last month was the warmest September on record, blazing past September 2019’s record global average by 0.05°C, and 2016’s by 0.08°C, according to the latest report from the European Commission-backed Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which tracks global climate trends.

If you’re not surprised given past trends, you’re not alone. “In a way it would have been more surprising if suddenly we had seen the 10th warmest September on record, instead of the warmest,” says Freja Vamborg, Senior Scientist at C3S and lead author of the report. The record is not in itself significant, she adds. “But put together with past monthly records, and the fact that the last five years have also been the warmest on record, it shows that there is an ongoing trend in increasing global temperatures.”

At the current rate, 2020 is well on its way towards cracking 2016’s record for the hottest global averages over the course of a year. In a year already defined by the record melting of Greenland’s glaciers, near-record levels of shrinking Arctic sea ice, wildfires blazing across Siberia, and the hottest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, this is one superlative we could do without.

September’s was not even the first monthly record to tumble this year. May 2020 was also the hottest May on record, with temperatures in Siberia a full 10°C above average. That’s the difference between wearing a coat or cut-offs to walk the dog.

Siberia still isn’t getting a break, according to Copernicus: the region’s long, hot, summer has extended into September, with higher-than average temperatures. And the Middle East is racing to catch up. Turkey and Israel also had their warmest Septembers on record. In Jordan, a rare September heatwave forced outdoor work to a halt and schools to close.

In the United States, Los Angeles broke temperature records not just for the month, but for the entire summer, reporting 49°C (121°F) on Sept. 6, an all-time high for the county, and contributing to a spate of disastrous wildfires that blanketed the state in choking smoke. In the Southern Hemisphere, Paraguay and southern Brazil also experienced excessively warm springtime Septembers. Australia, not a novice when it comes to heat, did comparatively well: last month was only the second highest on record.

Read More: What It’s Like Living in One of the Hottest Cities on Earth—Where It May Soon Be Uninhabitable

With nearly three months left in the year, it’s impossible to say if we will surpass 2016’s record heat, or just meet 2019’s second-hottest figures, says Vamborg. An el Niña weather cycle is lowering temperatures in the Pacific, but the unprecedented high temperatures in the Arctic could mitigate that cooling effect. And the near-record decline in Arctic sea ice coverage going into autumn will affect temperatures as well.

Either way, the trend lines are clear. Human induced climate change has caused at least one degree warming since the pre-industrial era, and global average temperatures are edging ever closer to the 1.5°C goal limit set by the Paris Climate Accords. “The key message is that the earth is warming,” says Vamborg. “Some months it’s warming more, and some months less, some years more, and some less. It’s not too late to do something about it, but in order to stop the warming, emissions need to be reduced.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: Nobel Prize for Chemistry Awarded for ‘Genome Scissors’ Nobel Prize for Chemistry Awarded for ‘Genome Scissors’

(STOCKHOLM) — French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer A. Doudna have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a method of genome editing likened to “molecular scissors” that offer the promise of one day curing genetic diseases.

The recipients were announced Wednesday in Stockholm by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“There is enormous power in this genetic tool, which affects us all,” said Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “It has not only revolutionised basic science, but also resulted in innovative crops and will lead to ground-breaking new medical treatments.”

Gustafsson said that as a result, any genome can now be edited “to fix genetic damage.”

Gusfafsson cautioned that the “enormous power of this technology means we have to use it with great care” but that it “is equally clear that this is a technology, a method that will provide humankind with great opportunities.”

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million krona (more than $1.1 million), courtesy of a bequest left more than a century ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The amount was increased recently to adjust for inflation.

“I was very emotional, I have to say,” Charpentier told reporters by phone from Berlin after hearing of the award.

On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus. Tuesday’s prize for physics went to Roger Penrose of Britain, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the United States for their breakthroughs in understanding the mysteries of cosmic black holes.

The other prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of literature, peace and economics.

New story in Science and Health from Time: American Andrea Ghez and 2 Others Win Nobel Prize in Physics American Andrea Ghez and 2 Others Win Nobel Prize in Physics

(STOCKHOLM) — Three physicists have won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for black hole discoveries.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Tuesday that Briton Roger Penrose will receive half of this year’s prize “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”

Goran K. Hansson, the academy’s secretary-general, said German Reinhard Genzel and American Andrea Ghez will receive the second half of the prize “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: It’s Been 25 Years Since We Found the First Exoplanet. Now We Know of Thousands—and Some Could Harbor Life It’s Been 25 Years Since We Found the First Exoplanet. Now We Know of Thousands—and Some Could Harbor Life

Nobody gives out awards for Worst Planet in the Galaxy—and it would be a dubious honor at best. Somewhere out there may be other garden planets like Earth. Somewhere too may be near-miss worlds like Mars. And somewhere out there are planets like 51 Pegasi b which, if it didn’t win the Worst Planet nod, would surely make it to the medal round.

Located about 50 light years from Earth, 51 Pegasi b is a gas giant like Jupiter, with a mass about 150 times that of Earth, circling its host star at a distance of just 7 million km (4.3 million mi.). Orbiting so close, 51 Pegasi b has a surface temperature estimated at 1,000º C (1,800º F). It’s also tidally locked, meaning one side is always facing that solar oven.

But 51 Pegasi b is more than just an overheated gas ball. In fact, it’s one of the most significant planets ever discovered—so important that, in 2019, the astronomers who found it were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Why? Because whatever its shortcomings, it was the first planet ever discovered outside our own solar system orbiting a main sequence star like the sun. With that, the field of exoplanets was born.

51 Pegasi b was discovered on October 6, 1995, and 25 years later, the exoplanet count has grown tremendously. By the most recent tally, there are 4,354 known exoplanets, including 712 multi-planet systems, for a total of 3,218 solar systems beyond our own. Virtually every one of the hundreds of trillions of stars in the universe is now believed to harbor at least one world—and many are home to whole litters. The Earth, which once sat at the center of humanity’s map of the cosmos, is now known to be an impossibly tiny part of an impossibly vast planetary census.

Astronomers didn’t spot 55 Pegasi b directly—it’s no more possible to visualize a planet in the glare of its parent star from a distance of 50 light years than it is to see a moth fluttering near a streetlight from half a dozen blocks away. Instead, the investigators used the radial velocity method, which involves looking at the slight gravitational wobble a planet causes in its star as it makes its orbit. It’s a nifty method for discovering planets, but it’s slow, as only one star can be observed at a time.

With the 2009 launch of the Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers switched to a technique that can scoop up whole netfuls of worlds at once. Known as the transit method, the technique involves looking for the slight dimming in light that occurs when a planet passes across the Earth-facing side of its parent star. The greater the dimming, the bigger the diameter of the planet. The more frequently the dimming occurs, the faster the planet orbits. Both Kepler and and its follow-on observatory, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), stare unblinking at entire patches of sky at once, observing thousands of potential transits for astronomers to study.

The transit method had turned up far more promising worlds than 55 Pegasi b. There’s Proxima Centauri b, an Earth-like planet just 4.2 light years away, which orbits its star in the “Goldilocks zone,” where temperatures are just right for liquid water to exist. There’s Ross 128 b, another Earth-sized world just 11 light years away, where surface temperatures are estimated to be a balmy 23º C (73º F). There’s the Trappist-1 solar system, just 39 light years distant and home to no fewer than seven Earth-like worlds, at least six of which could orbit in the Goldilocks zone.

The 25 years in which we went from knowing of no other exoplanets to identifying thousands of them (and being certain of trillions more) is a long time when measured against a human lifespan. On the scale of cosmological time, it’s hardly a flicker. But in that flicker, our grasp of our place in the universe was transformed forever. Earth may seem far less special than it did when it was one of only just eight known planets. But it’s home to a species both wiser and humbler for the knowledge it has gained.

New story in Science and Health from Time: 3 Win Nobel Medicine Prize for Discovering Hepatitis C Virus 3 Win Nobel Medicine Prize for Discovering Hepatitis C Virus

(STOCKHOLM) — Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton won the Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus, a major source of liver disease that affects millions worldwide.

Announcing the prize in Stockholm, the Nobel Committee noted that the trio’s work identified a major source of blood-borne hepatitis that couldn’t be explained by the previously discovered hepatitis A and B viruses. Their work, dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, has helped saved millions of lives, the committee said.

“Thanks to their discovery, highly sensitive blood tests for the virus are now available and these have essentially eliminated post-transfusion hepatitis in many parts of the world, greatly improving global health,” the committee said.

“Their discovery also allowed the rapid development of antiviral drugs directed at hepatitis C,” it added. “For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating hepatitis C virus from the world population.”

The World Health Organization estimates there are over 70 million cases of hepatitis C worldwide and 400,000 deaths from it each year. The disease is chronic and a major cause of liver cancer and cirrhosis requiring liver transplants.

The medicine prize carried particular significance this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has highlighted the importance that medical research has for societies and economies around the world.

Will Irving, a virologist at the University of Nottingham, said that identifying hepatitis C had been the “holy grail” in medicine.

“After hepatitis A and B were discovered in the 1970s, it was clear there was still at least one other virus or more that were causing liver damage,” he said.

“We knew there was a virus in the blood supply, because when people had blood transfusion they would get liver damage,” Irving said. “It was recognized as a risk but there was nothing we could do. We didn’t know what the virus was and we couldn’t test for it.”

Nobel Committee member Patrik Ernfors drew a parallel between this year’s prize and the current rush by millions of scientists around the world to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

“The first thing you need to do is to identify the causing virus,” he told reporters. “And once that has been done, that is, in itself, the starting point for development of drugs to treat the disease and also to develop vaccines against the disorder.”

“So the actual discovery, viral discovery itself, is a critical moment,” said Ernfors.

Unlike hepatitis A, which is transmitted via food or water and causes an acute infection that can last a few weeks, hepatitis B and C are transmitted through blood.

American scientist Baruch Blumberg discovered the hepatitis B virus in 1967 and received the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine, but this did not explain all cases of chronic hepatitis, a disease that was becoming more common even in apparently healthy people who had received or given blood.

“Before the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, it was a bit like Russian roulette to get a blood transfusion,” said Nobel Committee member Nils-Goran Larsson.

Alter, who was born in 1935 in New York, was working at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda when he discovered that plasma from patients who didn’t have hepatitis B could also could transfer the disease.

“The breakthrough came in 1989, when Michael Houghton and colleagues working at Chiron Corporation used a combination of molecular biology and immunology-based techniques to clone the virus,” said Nobel Committee member Gunilla Karlsson-Hedestam.

Later, Nobel winner Rice confirmed that a cloned hepatitis virus alone could cause persistent infection in chimpanzees and reproduce the disease observed in humans.

The hepatitis C virus belongs to a group known as flaviviruses that also includes West Nile virus, dengue virus and yellow fever virus.

Thomas Perlmann, the Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee, said he managed to reach two of the winners, Alter and Rice.

“I had to call a couple of times before they answered,” he said. “They seemed very surprised and very, very happy.”

The prestigious Nobel award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1,118,000), courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

Graham Foster, professor of hepatology at Queen Mary University, said the discovery of hepatitis C had prevented millions from getting sick or dying of the disease or other liver problems and that the awarding of the Nobel to Alter, Houghton and Rice was very well deserved.

Foster said the discovery has had significant impacts in both developing countries, like Egypt and Pakistan, where millions were infected by the disease via contaminated medical equipment or procedures, and in developed countries like the U.S., where the blood supply itself was often contaminated.

“This discovery allowed for safe blood transfusion and it allowed the rapid development of treatments for hepatitis C,” Foster said. “We are now in a position where we have drugs that are 96% effective if you take a pill for eight weeks.”

He said Egypt had implemented a massive screening program to detect hepatitis C and virtually eliminated the disease.

Foster estimated in recent years, tens of millions of people have been infected with hepatitis C.

“Identifying the virus has allowed us to protect the majority of those people.”

The Nobel Committee often recognizes basic science that has laid the foundations for practical applications in common use today.

“It takes time before it’s fully apparent how beneficial a discovery is,” said Perlmann. “Of course these serological tests have been around for quite a while, but the antiviral drugs that emerged as a consequence of this significant discovery have been much more recent.”

Monday’s medicine award is the first of six prizes in 2020 being announced through Oct. 12. The other prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

___

Jordans reported from Berlin. Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.