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LONDON (Reuters) – Losing your sense of smell and taste may be the best way to tell if you have COVID-19, according to a study of data collected via a symptom tracker app developed by British scientists to help monitor the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus. FILE PHOTO: A poster in the window of a pharmacy is pictured

Researchers in the US and China reported Monday they have developed an artificial intelligence tool that is able to accurately predict which newly infected patients with the novel coronavirus go on to develop severe lung disease. Once deployed, the algorithm could assist doctors in making choices about where to prioritize care in resource-stretched health care

Governments across Europe are turning to technology to track the spread of the coronavirus and monitor people under quarantine, an approach that seeks to learn from Asia but is also putting the region’s privacy rules to the test. From Helsinki to Madrid, applications are being developed for people to report their symptoms to doctors and

The United States Space Force launched its first national security mission Thursday, sending an ultra-secure military communication satellite into orbit even as the coronavirus pandemic paralyzes much of the country. The Lockheed Martin Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 4:18 pm (Friday, 01:48 am IST) aboard an

Amazon Alexa users in the US can now get basic COVID-19 diagnosis from the Amazon virtual assistant, the company has announced in a blog post. Users in the country can now engage Alexa to ask them about their symptoms, travel history, and possible exposure to the virus. Queries like “Alexa, what do I do if

FILE PHOTO: SpaceX founder and chief engineer Elon Musk attends a post-launch news conference to discuss the SpaceX Crew Dragon astronaut capsule in-flight abort test at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. January 19, 2020. REUTERS/Steve Nesius (Reuters) – NASA on Friday picked a new space capsule from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said on Friday it would have to adjust its 2020 launch programme because of a halt in satellite production in Europe, amid the coronavirus outbreak. The head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, will hold several meetings to discuss the adjustments via video on Friday and Saturday, the agency said

With the states across India pulling out all stops in the country’s battle against coronavirus, a Chennai-based drone company too is using its technological innovations to tackle the scourge in Chhattisgarh capital Raipur and elsewhere. “Our drones will spray disinfectant on areas specified by the Chhattisgarh government, usually hospital areas, government offices and buildings,” Agnishwar

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have unearthed fossils of a fearsome feathered dinosaur in northwestern New Mexico that was a quick and agile predator that could chase down smaller prey or swarm larger prey in pack attacks 67 million years ago. And, judging from a telltale scar on one of its menacing sickle-shaped claws, this Cretaceous

Folding@Home, a crowdsourced computing project from scientists at Stanford University lets people across world join computing capabilities of their personal computers to form a crowdsourced supercomputer. Folding@Home then carries out research, mostly on diseases like Cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and now COVID-19. With the coronavirus outbreak, Folding@Home comes as a platform that will allow people across

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A worm-like creature smaller than a grain of rice that burrowed on the sea floor in search of meals like dead organic matter about 555 million years ago may be the evolutionary forerunner of most animals living today – including people. The primitive worm-like animal Ikaria wariootia that lived 555 million years

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombia’s central military hospital, which for decades was inundated with victims of landmines and other casualties of the country’s internal conflict, is being outfitted to battle a new enemy: coronavirus. A Colombian soldier stands outside one of the tents being built in a parking lot of the Military Hospital for patients with

FILE PHOTO: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Crew Dragon astronaut capsule, lifts off on an in-flight abort test , a key milestone before flying humans in 2020 under NASA’s commercial crew program, from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. January 19, 2020. REUTERS/Joe Skipper (Reuters) – Private rocket company SpaceX

An analysis of coronavirus patients’ voices could yield a “vocal fingerprint” to help detect COVID-19 symptoms in others and prioritise testing and treatment, the Israeli Defence Ministry said on Tuesday. Starting this week, an Israeli startup company working with hospitals and academic institutions will sample voices of confirmed coronavirus patients through a mobile application in

FILE PHOTO: A Gilead Sciences, Inc. office is shown in Foster City, California, U.S. May 1, 2018. REUTERS/Stephen Lam (Reuters) – Gilead Sciences Inc’s experimental drug remdesivir, seen as one of the more promising potential treatments for the coronavirus, on Monday received the orphan drug designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The announcement

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut were spending their final weeks on Earth in quarantine before they are scheduled to blast off on April 9 for the International Space Station for six months as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps Earth. Launching from a pad in Kazakhstan, the Expedition 63 crew will depart

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Scientists in Singapore say they have developed a way to track genetic changes that speeds testing of vaccines against a coronavirus that has killed more than 16,000 people worldwide. FILE PHOTO: The ultrastructural morphology exhibited by the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which was identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory

As COVID-19 pandemic keeps governments on their toes, NASA and other space agencies have added stringent measures to prevent the spread of coronavirus among astronauts so that they do not carry the deadly virus into space. NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Nikolai Tikhonov and Andrei Babkin are likely to be launched for the International

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese biopharmaceutical firm Anges Inc said on Tuesday it and partner Osaka University had completed development of a prophylactic DNA vaccine against the new coronavirus and that it would begin testing it in animals soon. Shares of Anges were untraded with a glut of buy orders in early morning. There are now

NASA said it has suspended work on building and testing the rocket and capsule for its Artemis manned mission to the Moon due to the rising number of coronavirus cases in the community. The space agency is shutting down its Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where the Space Launch System rocket is being built,

The government on Friday announced to postpone the nation’s first summit on Artificial Intelligence (AI) that was scheduled to be held in the Capital in October amid the growing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Titled ‘RAISE 2020 (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment 2020),’ the summit on October 5-6 was announced as a global meeting of minds to

A team of US researchers has invented a portable surveillance device powered by machine learning called ‘FluSense’ that can detect coughing and crowd size in real time, analyse the data to directly monitor flu-like illnesses and influenza trends and predict the next pandemic in the making. The ‘FluSense’ creators from University of Massachusetts Amherst said

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The coronavirus outbreak dealt a blow to NASA’s plans to return Americans to the moon by 2024, as the space agency chief on Thursday ordered the temporary closure of two rocket production facilities after an employee tested positive for the respiratory illness. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement he was

Google sister company Verily launched a website late on Sunday that invites adults in northern California to answer questions about their recent health and travel that could result in their getting a free coronavirus test. US President Donald Trump had thanked Google on Friday for developing a website that he said would help people determine whether

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Inside the stout fins of a fish that prowled the shallow waters of an estuary in what is now eastern Canada about 380 million years ago, scientists have found what they call the evolutionary origins of the human hand. FILE PHOTO: An artist’s reconstruction of the extinct fish Elpistostege watsoni, which lived

Three months ago, the idea that most video conferences will happen with at least one child or more making a ruckus in the background would have seemed strange, but coronavirus-related lockdown around the world is turning this kind of scene into the norm now. As COVID-19 continues to spread — with more positive cases and deaths

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A fossil unearthed in Belgium dubbed the “Wonderchicken” is providing a rare glimpse into the early evolution of modern birds at the twilight of the age of dinosaurs, right before an asteroid impact altered the course of life on Earth. Researchers on Wednesday described a partridge-sized bird named Asteriornis maastrichtensis that inhabited

After two of its employees tested positive for the Novel Coronavirus, NASA has made telework mandatory in two centres, while encouraging other employees to work remotely if they can. The two employees who have tested positive for coronavirus are from Ames Research Center in California and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. NASA made

(Reuters) – Drugs used for treating arthritis are being tested as treatments for COVID-19, the disease caused by a new coronavirus, as researchers rush to find ways of helping patients and slowing the number of infections. FILE PHOTO: A Sanofi sign outside the French drugmaker’s Paris headquarters, October 30, 2014. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann//File Photo Sanofi and

BEIJING (Reuters) – A new Chinese medium-lift rocket, part of a family of launch vehicles meant to support most of China’s launch missions in future, failed on its debut flight, the official news agency Xinhua reported. The Long March 7A, a variant of the Long March 7, blasted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center,

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian researchers said on Tuesday they have mapped the immune responses from one of country’s first coronavirus patients, findings that the health minister said were an important step in developing a vaccine and treatment. FILE PHOTO: The ultrastructural morphology exhibited by the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which was identified as the cause

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy on Monday challenged researchers to use artificial intelligence technology to analyse about 29,000 scholarly articles to answer key questions about the coronavirus. The White House office said it had partnered with companies such as Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google to compile the most extensive database of scholarly

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk who thinks the new coronavirus (COVID-19) debate is just ‘dumb,’ on Sunday said that the unnecessary fear over the pandemic is not good for humanity. “Fear is the mind-killer,” Musk tweeted. Amid the rapid spread of the Novel Coronavirus which has killed nearly 5,000 people in the world, Musk

Amid the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus which has killed nearly 5,000 people in the world, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to be dancing to his own tune, underplaying the danger from the threat time and again. In a memo to SpaceX employees on Friday, Musk said that they were far less

Even as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s wife tested positive for COVID-19 and the country’s markets posted their biggest one-day loss in history on Thursday, a team of Canadian researchers, including an Indian, said they have isolated the virus behind the global pandemic. The isolation of the virus by researchers from Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital, the

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Valentina Tereshkova was hailed as a hero when she became the first woman in space in 1963. FILE PHOTO: Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman cosmonaut, attends a news conference in Star City outside Moscow, June 7, 2013. REUTERS/Sergei Remezov/File Photo Now 83, she has became a hate figure for some

The European Space Agency and Russia’s Roscosmos said Thursday they are postponing a planned joint mission to Mars until 2022, in part due to travel restrictions resulting from the new coronavirus outbreak. The ExoMars mission was due to launch this year but concerns about possible technical problems had already prompted both agencies to discuss the

FILE PHOTO: A full-size model of the ExoMars entry, descent and landing module, Schiaparell is seen during a press conference at the European Space Agency (ESA) Headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany October 20, 2016. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach/File Photo MOSCOW/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – A joint Russian-European mission to send a rover to Mars has been postponed by two years

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s space agency Roscosmos and the European Space Agency have decided to postpone the launch of a joint research mission to Mars until autumn 2022 because of the situation around coronavirus in Europe, Roscosmos said on Thursday. “…The parties had to recognize that the final phase of ExoMars activities are compromised by

Scientists have detected an exotic planet in another solar system where the weather forecast is always dire – a 100 percent chance of the most outrageous rain imaginable, with droplets of scaldingly hot liquid iron. The researchers said on Wednesday they used the planet-hunting ESPRESSO instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists are marveling over the exquisitely preserved skull of what appears to be the smallest-known bird – tinier than any hummingbird – encased in 99-million-year-old amber and boasting many odd traits including jaws studded with numerous puny teeth. The skull, measuring about half an inch (14.25 mm) long, belongs to a bird

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On a crag of rock called Brother’s Point on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, scientists have identified two bustling footprint sites that reveal an abundance of dinosaurs that thrived 170 million years ago including an early member of a celebrated group. University of Edinburgh scientists Steve Brusatte and Paige dePolo pose at a

Supermoon for the month of March is here and it is going to be visible till Wednesday. The current supermoon that will appear from Monday evening, is coinciding with the Holi celebrations in India that will take place on March 10. It is not necessary for March’s supermoon to coincide with Holi as the festival’s

Finding signs of life on Mars has long been an obsession for astrophysicists (and apparently, Elon Musk as well). And even though discovering an intelligent life form on Mars might sound too far-fetched, recent discoveries suggest that life may have existed millennia ago on the red planet at a microbial level. New research further supports the

The astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have managed to successfully cultivate salad crop — red romaine lettuce — that is free of disease-causing microbes and safe to eat, and is at least as nutritious as Earth-grown plants. This feat was achieved despite being grown under lower gravity and more intense radiation than on

A recent study has found out that our fundamental measurement of the whole universe could have been wrong all this while. It says that whatever we knew about the chemical measurement of stars could be wrong. And since the whole history of the universe has been tracked using these very stars, our measurement of the

Boeing faces 61 safety fixes following last year’s botched test flight of its Starliner crew capsule, NASA said Friday. NASA has also designated December’s aborted space station mission as a serious “high-visibility close call” that could have destroyed the capsule — twice. In releasing the outcome of a joint investigation, NASA said it still has

SpaceX on Thursday announced a partnership to send three tourists to the International Space Station (ISS), the first private trip in more than a decade. Elon Musk’s company has signed a deal with Axiom Space to transport the tourists along with a commander on one of its Crew Dragon capsules in the second half of