Asteroid “fist bump”, common COVID test and open access agreement

NASA surpasses results when sampling asteroids

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission exceeded expectations when it grabbed rocks and earth from the surface of asteroid Bennu on October 20. The spacecraft collected so much material that several rocks got stuck in its collection mechanism, opening it up and allowing smaller particles to drift into space. Mission managers have accelerated plans for the spacecraft to put the collected material inside a container to reduce the amount lost.

OSIRIS-REx touched Bennu for 6 seconds, when his collector plunged up to 48 centimeters into the rough surface of the asteroid (pictured). Images from the spacecraft cameras show that the binder is full of material, much more than the minimum of 60 grams it was intended to collect. To avoid further losses, the nacelle will skip a maneuver in which it had to rotate by itself to weigh the collected material. Scientists won’t know how much OSIRIS-REx asteroid rubble ultimately collected until the particles return to Earth in 2023.

The mission is NASA’s first to collect samples from an asteroid. The space agency hopes to learn more about how asteroids formed and evolved from specimens. The spacecraft will orbit Bennu until March 2021, when it returns to Earth.

The math-based strategy makes COVID testing easier

In “pooled” tests for SARS – CoV-2, samples from multiple individuals are combined into one batch which is then tested for the virus. Now, a large-scale study has shown that blended tests can be highly efficient, even more than theory predicted.

Moran Yassour of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues tested 133,816 nose and throat samples by pooling five or eight individual samples into a group sample (N. Barak et al. Preprint on medRxiv https://doi.org/ffkx; 2020). If one group tested positive, each constituent sample was retested. The groups that tested negative were not tested again.

Using this method, the researchers required only a quarter of the tests they would need to check each sample individually. They needed less testing than expected, because people from the same family, university, nursing home or hospital tend to get tested together, increasing the likelihood that positive samples are in the same groups. The results have not yet been peer reviewed.

Nature magazines announce first open access deal

The publisher of Nature agreed its first agreement to allow some researchers to publish in the journal, and in 33 other Nature-branded titles, in terms of open access (OA).

In April, publisher Springer Nature announced it would offer OA publishing paths for its more selective journals that would be compliant with Plan S, a European-led initiative to open up scientific literature. (Nature is editorially independent of its publisher.)

The German digital library Max Planck (MPDL) in Munich has negotiated the first such agreement, which will start in 2021. The agreement, announced on 20 October, is being offered to around 120 German institutions, and the first to register is the Max Planck Society.

Institutions that sign up will pay a lump sum which allows unlimited OA publication of articles in the 34 journals; they will also be able to read those journals and 21 other Nature Reviews titles. The sum is calculated based on a price of € 9,500 (US $ 11,200) per item. This is higher than the OA per-article rates charged by other selective journals, which are less than US $ 6,000.

The offer is “very attractive,” says Ralf Schimmer, information manager at the MPDL. But he acknowledges that the price per item is unprecedented.

Some other OA supporters have criticized the deal. The sum per article is “exorbitant” and the deal does nothing to improve the accessibility of the academic publishing system, say Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, two librarians at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.