With his narrow chin, small nose and curly hair he physically resembles his father, said radiologist Sahar Saleem. Perhaps surprisingly for someone who lived about 3,500 years ago, he also has strikingly good teeth. From a report: Saleem is talking about the mummified body of the pharaoh Amenhotep I, a warrior king who has been something of an enigma in that he is one of the few royal mummies not to be unwrapped in modern times. Until now, that is. Saleem, a professor of radiology at the faculty of medicine at Cairo University, is part of a team which has successfully unwrapped Amenhotep I not physically but digitally. The results, using 3D computed tomography (CT) scanning technology, are unprecedented and fascinating. They provide details about his appearance and the lavishness of the jewellery he was buried with. "We show that Amenhotep I was approximately 35 years old when he died," Saleem said. âoeHe was approximately 169cm tall [5ft 6in], circumcised, and had good teeth. Within his wrappings, he wore 30 amulets and a unique golden girdle with gold beads. "Amenhotep I seems to have physically resembled his father ... he had a narrow chin, a small narrow nose, curly hair, and mildly protruding upper teeth."

When The Matrix Resurrections premiered in San Francisco, the city's mayor "celebrated the appearance of her fair city in the film and cheered the film's economic contributions to the region," reports SFGate. "But there's a problem of aesthetics at play here... It is undeniably a dystopian hellscape where police rule the city and technology looms over all..." In the first section of the movie, the metaphor of the Matrix mirrors that of the tech industry depicted in the film. Tech is stereotypical here — lots of T-shirt-wearing men playing ping-pong and talking about how to design the next great video game. The most annoying character in the film, Jude (Andrew Caldwell), is a proxy for all annoying tech bros...
Meanwhile Politico writes that the original 1999 film The Matrix actually "changed politics, almost entirely by mistake," and calls the new Matrix Resurections "a sophisticated self-critique of the culture that swallowed it." In the past two decades, the idea of a "red pill" has taken on a life of its own in American culture, most prominently at first in an infamous misogynist subreddit, and then more broadly as a symbol of any kind of political awakening, almost always on the right. The idea has proliferated wildly throughout politics, and especially the darkest ideological corners of the internet, in which to be "red-pilled" means to realize that American society has been hopelessly debased by liberals, requiring a total rethink of its premises... Hugo Weaving, who memorably portrayed the original films' villain, lamented in a 2020 interview how people "will take something that they think is cool and they will repurpose it to fit themselves when the original intention or meaning of that thing was quite the opposite...." [T]he Wachowskis have been largely silent about the "meaning" of their creation — a movie franchise that not only became a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, but predicted the cultural tenor of politics in the digital age with an eerie, oracular accuracy. We know they got it right, but what did they think about it?

Wednesday saw the release of "The Matrix Resurrections," a long-delayed sequel from one of the original writer/directors (Lana directed; Lilly sat it out) — and also an answer to that question. As a movie, it's everything its predecessors was, an impressive feat of visual-effects artistry, action choreography and original sci-fi worldbuilding. But even more, it's a two hour and 27-minute-long piece of cultural criticism. The film interrogates, to a jarringly specific degree, not just its own iconography, but how American culture has evolved around and bastardized it over the past two decades. "The Matrix Resurrections" is both wildly successful popcorn entertainment and a window into a long-misunderstood creative mind. But in refitting its entire premise to the social media age, it illustrates just how much the contours of American society have changed in the intervening decades....

The original "Matrix" was deeply of its time. Reeves' Neo a was a quintessential late 1990s corporate drone, captive to the professional ennui also depicted in films of the era like "Fight Club" and "Office Space." Its modern incarnation is a cry of protest against something else: society's willingness to trade individual agency for the neurological reward pellets of the Online. Visual metaphors abound, with Reeves disoriented by a procession of mirrors that serve as gateways to another world, another possible truth. "Your brain is hooked on this shit the Matrix has been feeding you for years," one character tells him. "They don't know you like I do.

"I know exactly what you need...."
The movie is streaming now on HBOMax for subscribers in their $15 ad-free tier — but, like, Dune, only during its 31-day theatrical run.

FFP stands for "filtering face piece." It is a European standard for mask efficiency, ranging from one, the lowest grade, to three, the highest. The Economist adds: FFP2 masks filter at least 94% of all aerosols, including airborne viruses such as covid-19. America's N95 and China's KN95 masks provide similar levels of protection. These disposable masks have several layers of different fabrics, including a polypropylene filter, made by "melt-blowing" polymer to create miniscule, irregular fibre patterns that can trap the smallest airborne particles. A study published in December by the Max Planck Institute, a German research organisation, found well-fitting FFP2 masks reduced the risk of infection with covid-19 to 0.1%. Cloth or medical masks, on the other hand, merely disrupt the airflow of the speaker and trap the largest aerosol particles in their woven material. Their efficacy varies wildly depending on the design and fabric used: tight-fitting, multi-layered masks made from dense materials are much more effective than single-layer linen masks. One study in the Journal of Education and Health Promotion found surgical masks were three times more effective at preventing inhalation of aerosols than homemade cloth ones. Another study, in JAMA Internal Medicine, a journal, compared different cloth masks and found that their efficacy at containing viral particles ranged from 26% to 79%.

Necklaces and accessories claiming to "protect" people from 5G mobile networks have been found to be radioactive. The BBC reports: The Dutch authority for nuclear safety and radiation protection (ANVS) issued a warning about ten products it found gave off harmful ionizing radiation. It urged people not to use the products, which could cause harm with long-term wear. [...] The products identified included an "Energy Armor" sleeping mask, bracelet and necklace. A bracelet for children, branded Magnetix Wellness, was also found to be emitting radiation.

"Don't wear it any more, put it away safely and wait for the return instructions," the ANVS said in a statement. "The sellers in the Netherlands known to the ANVS have been told that the sale is prohibited and must be stopped immediately, and that they must inform their customers about this." The ANVS has published a full list of the products it identified as radioactive on its website. Further reading: Worried About 5G's Health Effects? Don't Be

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has banned seven firms it says used its platforms to spy on some 50,000 unsuspecting targets, including human rights activists, government critics, celebrities, journalists and ordinary people in more than 100 countries. These "surveillance-for-hire" companies were linked to around 1,500 accounts on Facebook and Instagram that were used to collect information on people and try to trick them into handing over sensitive personal information so that the firms could install spyware on their devices, according to a report released on Thursday by Meta, formerly known as Facebook.

"Each of these actors rely on networks of fake accounts on our platforms that are used to deceive users and mislead them," Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta's head of security policy, told NPR. Some firms also used Meta's WhatsApp to infect targets' phones with malware. The surveillance was also carried out over other internet services, from email and text messages to Twitter and YouTube. The goal, Gleicher said, is to "spy on people or snoop on them without them knowing about it." Gleicher's team spent months investigating surveillance activity before taking action against the seven companies for violating Meta's community standards and terms of service. Four of the firms are based in Israel, and the other three in China, India, and North Macedonia.

They include Black Cube, an Israel-based intelligence group reportedly used by Harvey Weinstein to dig up dirt on his accusers and journalists. Meta said Black Cube created fake accounts posing as graduate students, human rights workers and film and TV producers and tried to set up phone calls and get email addresses for a wide range of targets, from Palestinian activists to people working in medicine, mining and nonprofit organizations to figures involved in Russia's tech, finance, real estate and media sectors. [...] Another Israeli firm called Bluehawk CI tried to trick government opponents in the United Arab Emirates by pretending to be reporters for Fox News and Italy's La Stampa, Meta said. Meta also took down accounts connected to "an unidentified entity in China" that, Meta says, made tools used by Chinese law enforcement to spy on minority groups in Xinjiang, Myanmar and Hong Kong. "Meta has banned the companies from its platforms, removed the accounts it linked to them, and sent them cease-and-desist warnings," adds NPR. "It is notifying around 50,000 people whom it believes were targeted, and shared its findings with security researchers, other tech companies and policymakers."

There is at present "no evidence" that the Omicron coronavirus variant is any less severe than the Delta strain, according to early findings from researchers at Imperial College London, which also highlighted the elevated risk of reinfection posed by Omicron and the need for booster shots to combat it. From a report: The research, based on UK infection data, casts doubt on the hopes of some experts that a change in the virulence of the new variant would ease the pressure on health systems despite Omicron's high levels of infectiousness. "The study finds no evidence of Omicron having lower severity than Delta, judged by either the proportion of people testing positive who report symptoms, or by the proportion of cases seeking hospital care after infection," said the research team, led by Professor Neil Ferguson, an infectious disease modeller and government science adviser. However, they cautioned that hospitalisation data "remains very limited at this time." The study said data suggested "at most, limited changes in severity compared with Delta." Early reports from medics in South Africa's Gauteng province, the centre of the Omicron outbreak there, had raised hopes that the variant's mutations might have led to a change in the virus' biology causing it to be less severe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A panel of outside advisers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday voted to recommend Americans choose to receive one of the other two authorized COVID-19 vaccines over Johnson & Johnson's shot, due to rare but sometimes fatal cases of blood clotting. The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization voted unanimously to make the recommendation in favor of the vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech over the J&J shot. The regulator still needs to sign off on the guidance.

Fewer Americans have received the J&J shot than the other two vaccines by a significant margin. Out of more than 200 million fully vaccinated people in the United States, around 16 million received J&J's vaccine, according to CDC data. [...] Members of the panel also said J&J's vaccine is less effective in preventing COVID-19 than the other two authorized vaccines. In a presentation to the committee, a leading J&J vaccine scientist said the vaccine generates a strong and long-lasting immune response with just a single shot.

The U.K. reported a record number of new daily Covid-19 cases on Wednesday, with 78,610 in the last 24 hours. From a report: The figure was an increase from 59,610 the day before, and it surpasses the previous high of 68,053 cases reported on Jan. 8. It underlines the dramatic surge in infections that the country is seeing ahead of the Christmas holiday period with the omicron variant expected to quickly become the dominant strain. One senior British health chief has warned that there could be "staggering" numbers in the next few days. Long queues have been seen outside vaccination centers in many U.K. cities and towns with the government putting its booster program on overdrive to try to get a third vaccine shot to as many people as possible. There were 165 new Covid deaths in the U.K. on Wednesday, according to government data. While deaths remain low currently and initial reports suggest that the omicron variant might not be any more severe than other Covid strains, health experts have repeatedly warned that the sheer number of infections could lead to mounting fatalities and an overwhelmed health-care system.

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: At least one person in the UK has died with the Omicron coronavirus variant, the prime minister has said. Boris Johnson said the new variant was also resulting in hospital admissions, and the "best thing" people could do was get their booster jab. Health Secretary Sajid Javid told MPs Omicron now represented 20% of cases in England. The PM has set a new target for all adults in England to be offered a booster by the end of the month. Mr Johnson said on Monday that people needed to recognize "the sheer pace at which [Omicron] accelerates through the population" and that they should set aside the idea that Omicron was a milder variant.

The UK recorded 54,661 new coronavirus cases on Monday, as well as 38 deaths within 28 days of a positive test. There are 4,713 confirmed cases of the Omicron variant but Mr Javid said the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) estimated the current number of daily infections was around 200,000. Omicron has risen to more than 44% of cases in London and is expected to become the dominant variant in the city in the next 48 hours, he said.

South Korea will soon roll out a pilot project to use artificial intelligence, facial recognition and thousands of CCTV cameras to track the movement of people infected with the coronavirus, despite concerns about the invasion of privacy. Reuters reports: The nationally funded project in Bucheon, one of the country's most densely populated cities on the outskirts of Seoul, is due to become operational in January, a city official told Reuters. The system uses an AI algorithms and facial recognition technology to analyze footage gathered by more than 10,820 CCTV cameras and track an infected person's movements, anyone they had close contact with, and whether they were wearing a mask, according to a 110-page business plan from the city submitted to the Ministry of Science and ICT (Information and Communications Technology), and provided to Reuters by a parliamentary lawmaker critical of the project.

The Bucheon official said the system should reduce the strain on overworked tracing teams in a city with a population of more than 800,000 people, and help use the teams more efficiently and accurately. [...] The Ministry of Science and ICT said it has no current plans to expand the project to the national level. It said the purpose of the system was to digitize some of the manual labour that contact tracers currently have to carry out. The Bucheon system can simultaneously track up to ten people in five to ten minutes, cutting the time spent on manual work that takes around half an hour to one hour to trace one person, the plan said.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot quotes SciTechDaily: A discovery by researchers at the Texas A&M College of Medicine could lead to new therapies to prevent the virus from proliferating in the human body... The underlying mechanism of how SARS-CoV-2 escapes from the immune system has been poorly understood. However, researchers from the Texas A&M University College of Medicine and Hokkaido University have recently discovered a major mechanism that explains how SARS-CoV-2 can escape from the immune system and replicate in the human body. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

"We found that the SARS-CoV-2 virus carries a suppressive gene that acts to inhibit a human gene in the immune system that is essential for destroying infected cells," said Dr. Koichi Kobayashi, adjunct professor at the College of Medicine and lead author of the paper.

Naturally, the cells in a human's immune system are able to control virus infection by destroying infected cells so that the virus cannot be replicated. The gene that is essential in executing this process, called NLRC5, regulates major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I genes, which are genes that create a pathway that is vital in providing antiviral immunity. Kobayashi and his colleagues discovered this in 2012.

"During infection, the amount and activity of NLRC5 gene become augmented in order to boost our ability of eradication of viruses," Kobayashi said. "We discovered that the reason why SARS-CoV-2 can replicate so easily is because the virus carries a suppressive gene, called ORF6, that acts to inhibit the function of NLRC5, thus inhibiting the MHC class I pathway as well."

New FDA-approved eye drops could replace reading glasses for millions: "It's definitely a life changer" "A newly approved eye drop hitting the market on Thursday could change the lives of millions of Americans with age-related blurred near vision, a condition affecting mostly people 40 and older," reports CBS News.

"Vuity, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in October, would potentially replace reading glasses for some of the 128 million Americans who have trouble seeing close-up." The new medicine takes effect in about 15 minutes, with one drop on each eye providing sharper vision for six to 10 hours, according to the company.... Vuity is the first FDA-approved eye drop to treat age-related blurry near vision, also known as presbyopia. The prescription drug utilizes the eye's natural ability to reduce its pupil size, said Dr. George Waring, the principal investigator for the trial.

"Reducing the pupil size expands the depth of field or the depth of focus, and that allows you to focus at different ranges naturally," he said.

A 30-day supply of the drug will cost about $80 and works best in people 40 to 55 years old, a Vuity spokesperson said. Side effects detected in the three-month trial included headaches and red eyes, the company said.

An Israeli study tracked more than 843,000 people who received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine — and then explored whether the results improved for the 758,000 who then also got a booster shot.

The results? HealthDay reports: Boosted folks are 90% less likely to die from a Delta infection than people relying solely on the initial two-dose vaccination, Israeli data show.

That protection will be critically important during the next couple of months as the Delta variant continues to dominate throughout the United States, said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. "While we are preoccupied with Omicron, you need to remember that Delta is essentially in every town and city in the United States today — being transmitted, infecting new people, sending people to the hospital, in some parts of the country stressing the health care system once again," Schaffner said. "Although we have Omicron in the United States and it's starting to take hold, nonetheless well over 95% of all new infections today are caused by Delta...."

A second study out of Israel focused on infection and severity of illness, and it also produced good tidings for boosters in the face of the Delta variant. This study involved nearly 4.7 million Israelis who'd been fully vaccinated with Pfizer and were eligible for boosters. Confirmed infections were tenfold lower in the group of people who got the Pfizer booster, researchers reported. Further, results showed that the longer a booster was in a person's system, the more resistant they became to infection from the Delta strain.

The Food and Drug Administration authorized the first injectable monoclonal antibody cocktail for long-term prevention of Covid-19 among people with weakened immune systems before they have been exposed to the coronavirus. NBC News reports: The FDA issued an emergency use authorization Wednesday for AstraZeneca's antibody cocktail, Evusheld, for what is known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, against Covid-19. To date, such laboratory-produced antibodies have been authorized only as early treatment of Covid-19 or as preventive therapy for high-risk people immediately after close contact with someone who has tested positive.

Evusheld can be used as PrEP by people ages 12 and older who are moderately to severely immunocompromised and may not get adequate immune responses from a Covid vaccine. The therapy is also an option for the rare people who have histories of severe adverse reactions to a Covid vaccine or its components. The AstraZeneca therapy involves getting preventive injections as often as every six months. According to a large placebo-controlled clinical trial, the cocktail is about 83 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease during such an interval. It's unclear how the highly mutated omicron variant of the coronavirus -- which is spreading in 57 countries, including the U.S. -- might affect the efficacy of the monoclonal antibody therapy.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from The New York Times: What if something in the blood of an athlete could boost the brainpower of someone who doesn't or can't exercise? Could a protein that gets amplified when people exercise help stave off symptoms of Alzheimer's and other memory disorders? That's the tantalizing prospect raised by a new study in which researchers injected sedentary mice with blood from mice that ran for miles on exercise wheels, and found that the sedentary mice then did better on tests of learning and memory. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, also found that the type of brain inflammation involved in Alzheimer's and other neurological disorders was reduced in sedentary mice after they received their athletic counterparts' blood. Scientific results with mice don't necessarily translate to humans. Still, experts said the study supports a growing body of research.

The study involved mice that were about three months old -- roughly the equivalent of 25-to-30-year olds for humans. Some of the mice, nocturnal animals that love to run, could freely use exercise wheels in their cages and logged about four to six miles on the wheels each night. The wheels were locked for other mice that could scoot around their cages but could not get an extended cardio workout. [...] After 28 days, the researchers took a third group of mice that also did not exercise and injected them with blood plasma, the liquid that surrounds blood cells, from either the runner mice or the non-runner mice. Mice receiving runner blood did better on two tests of learning and memory than those receiving blood from the non-runner mice. In one test, which measures how long a mouse will freeze in fear when it is returned to a cage where it previously received an electric foot shock, mice with runner blood froze 25 percent longer, indicating they had better memory of the stressful event [...]. In the other test, mice with runner blood were twice as fast at finding a platform submerged in opaque water, he said. The team also found that the brains of mice with runner blood produced more of several types of brain cells, including those that generate new neurons in the hippocampus, a region involved in memory and spatial learning. A genetic analysis showed that about 1,950 genes had changed in response to the infusion of runner blood, becoming either more or less activated. Most of the 250 genes with the greatest activation changes were involved in inflammation and their changes suggested that brain inflammation was reduced.

Switzerland is giving the green light to so-called "suicide capsules" -- 3-D printed pods that allow people to choose the place where they want to die an assisted death. Global News reports: The country's medical review board announced the legalization of the Sarco Suicide Pods this week. They can be operated by the user from the inside. Dr. Philip Nitschke, the developer of the pods and founder of Exit International, a pro-euthanasia group, told SwissInfo.ch the machines can be "towed anywhere for the death" and one of the most positive features of the capsules is that they can be transported to an "idyllic outdoor setting."

Currently, assisted suicide in Switzerland means swallowing a capsule filled with a cocktail of controlled substances that puts the person into a deep coma before they die. But Sarco pods -- short for sarcophagus -- allow a person to control their death inside the pod by quickly reducing internal oxygen levels. The person intending to end their life is required to answer a set of pre-recorded questions, then press a button that floods the interior with nitrogen. The oxygen level inside is quickly reduced from 21 per cent to one per cent. After death, the pod can be used as a coffin. [...]

Nitschke said his method of death is painless, and the person will feel a little bit disoriented and/or euphoric before they lose consciousness. He said there are only two capsule prototypes in existence, but a third machine is being printed now, and he expects this method to become available to the Swiss public next year.

Pfizer and BioNTech said initial lab studies show a third dose of their Covid-19 vaccine neutralizes the omicron variant, results that will accelerate booster shot drives around the world. From a report: A booster with the current version of the vaccine increased antibodies 25-fold, providing a similar level as observed after two doses against the original virus and other variants, the companies said Wednesday. Blood plasma from people immunized with two doses of the vaccine has neutralizing antibody levels more than 25-fold less versus omicron than against the original strain of the virus, the companies said. "It's clear from these preliminary data that protection is improved with a third dose," Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said in a statement. The initial data show a third dose could offer still offer enough protection from disease, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin said.

Scientists have raised concerns about a proposed overhaul of newborn screening that could lead to the UK becoming the first country to offer whole-genome sequencing for every baby. From a report: Speaking before the publication of plans for an NHS pilot study in which up to 200,000 babies' genomes will be sequenced and analysed, scientists suggested the initiative appeared designed to create a valuable health dataset rather than an effective method of improving the diagnosis of rare diseases. Anneke Lucassen, director of the Centre for Personalised Medicine at the University of Oxford, said that if the primary objective were improving newborn screening, there were alternative, more targeted tests that would be cheaper and potentially more reliable.

"If it was really all about [diagnosing more conditions], you could do that through other means," she said. "It's about helping to build the genomics industry in the UK and it's about creating a research resource so we can study people as they grow older." Lucassen said she was not opposed to the pilot, or even necessarily to these objectives, but wanted more transparency, "because otherwise it's sold as something that is not the full picture. The public needs to know that," she added. Sequencing the genomes of all newborns would represent a hugely ambitious upgrade to the routine "heel prick" test that all babies receive at about five days to detect nine serious health conditions including cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease and various metabolic diseases.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: New research this week finds that people hospitalized with severe covid-19 often pay a heavy price afterward. The study concluded that these survivors were more than twice as likely to die in the subsequent 12 months compared to people who had tested negative for the virus. This relatively increased risk of death was even higher for people under the age 65. While there remains much research to be done, studies thus far have made it clear that many covid-19 survivors can experience lingering symptoms even after the infection itself has cleared up. And those who are hospitalized are all the more vulnerable to these aftereffects. Severe covid often seriously damages the lungs and other organs, while life-saving interventions like steroids, ventilators, and life support devices like ECMO can take a toll on the body as well.

Researchers from the University of Florida had already published a study in July showing that hospitalized survivors were significantly more likely to be hospitalized again within six months, compared to those with mild to moderate covid-19. This new study of theirs, based on an examination of anonymous electronic health records, instead looked at the long-term mortality risk of patients up to a year later. Nearly 14,000 patients in the same health care system were studied. These included 178 diagnosed with severe COVID-19 and 246 diagnosed with mild to moderate covid-19, as well as many others who tested negative for the virus but may have been sick for other reasons and received medical care in some way. Compared to covid-negative patients, and even after accounting for other factors like age and sex, those with severe covid were 2.5 times more likely to die in the next 12 months after their illness. Overall, just over 52% of severe covid patients died in a year's time. There was no significant increased risk of mortality for mild to moderate cases, however. "About 20% of the deaths among these patients post-infection were attributed to problems with either the respiratory or cardiovascular system," the report adds. "[A]mong patients in this study, the associated risk of dying was actually relatively greater for survivors of severe covid under age 65 than it was for patients over 65. Compared to similarly aged but non-infected people, they were more than three times more likely to die in the months after their hospitalization."

The findings have been published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine.

The head of drugmaker Moderna said COVID-19 vaccines are unlikely to be as effective against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus as they have been previously, sparking fresh worry in financial markets about the trajectory of the pandemic. From a report: "There is no world, I think, where (the effectiveness) is the same level... we had with Delta," Moderna Chief Executive Stephane Bancel told the Financial Times in an interview. "I think it's going to be a material drop. I just don't know how much because we need to wait for the data. But all the scientists I've talked to are like 'this is not going to be good.'"

Vaccine resistance could lead to more sickness and hospitalisations and prolong the pandemic, and his comments triggered selling in growth-exposed assets like oil, stocks and the Australian dollar. Bancel added that the high number of mutations on the protein spike the virus uses to infect human cells meant it was likely the current crop of vaccines would need to be modified. He had earlier said on CNBC that it could take months to begin shipping a vaccine that does work against Omicron.