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Enlarge / A doctor wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) prepares to take a saliva swab from a patients during coronavirus symptom tests in the coronavirus outpatient clinic at the Paracelsus Clinic in Zwickau, Germany, on Thursday, April 2, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The US Food and Drug Administration this weekend authorized a saliva-based diagnostic test for COVID-19 that costs less than $5, is faster than current laboratory tests, and may dodge supply shortages plaguing the country—without losing much in accuracy, according to early data.

The test, called SalivaDirect, was developed by researchers at Yale University, who have no plans to commercialize the test and have made the test’s protocol completely open and available.

If the protocol becomes widely adopted, it could help improve the country’s COVID-19 testing, which is currently dismal. Some patients face weeks-long waits to get results. With such long delays, contact tracers have no chance of reaching out to those exposed before they have the chance to pass on the infection. The delays stem from the sheer volume of tests coming in, as well as shortages of critical supplies, such as nose swabs and chemical reagents necessary to run the tests. SalivaDirect tries to address both of those problems.

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  Blue hour at SLC-40 where SpaceX's Falcon 9 B1049.6 stands ready to loft the 11th batch of Starlink satellites. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

Let's spare a moment of thought for B1049, a Falcon 9 first-stage booster that made its debut in September 2018 by launching the Telstar 18V commercial mission. Then, in January 2019, the core launched another commercial mission, sending a passel of Iridium satellites into space.

Both were successes. Since then the first stage has lofted three different Starlink missions into low-Earth orbit as SpaceX seeks to build out a constellation of satellites to provide broadband Internet from space.

The Starlink platform may eventually turn into a very profitable business for SpaceX, although there remains a lot of work to do in regard to ground stations to receive signals, compliances with regulations, and more. But what is unquestionable is that launching Starlink missions has allowed SpaceX to push the boundaries of reuse with its Falcon 9 rocket.

Enlarge / Oracle’s approach comes after President Donald Trump last week ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok’s US operations within 90 days. (credit: Chris Delmas | Getty Images)

Oracle has entered the race to acquire TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned short video app that President Donald Trump has vowed to shut down unless it is taken over by a US company by mid-November, people briefed about the matter have said.

The tech company co-founded by Larry Ellison had held preliminary talks with TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, and was seriously considering purchasing the app's operations in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the people said.

Oracle was working with a group of US investors that already own a stake in ByteDance, including General Atlantic and Sequoia Capital, the people added.

Enlarge / Eyes painted on cattle rumps trick lions into thinking they have lost the element of surprise, a new study suggests. (credit: Ben Yexley)

Cattle herds in the Okavango delta region in Botswana are plagued by attacks by lions and other predators, prompting farmers to retaliate by killing the predators. An alternative nonlethal technique involves painting eyes on the butts of cattle to trick ambush predators like lions into thinking they've been spotted by their intended prey. It's called the "Eye-Cow Project," and a recent paper published in the journal Communications Biology provides some solid empirical evidence for the practice. There are now practical guides for using the "eye-cow" technique available in both English and Setswana, so farmers can try it out for themselves.

Neil Jordan, a conservation biologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, came up with the idea several years ago while he was doing field work in Botswana. Local farmers killed a pair of lionesses in retaliation for preying on their herds of cattle, and Jordan wanted to come up with a non-lethal alternative. The African lion population has dropped significantly from more than 100,000 in the 1990s to somewhere between 23,000 and 39,000 in 2016—much of it due to retaliation killings.

Jordan knew that butterfly wings sporting eye-like patterns are known to ward off preying birds, and are also found in certain fish, mollusks, amphibians and birds, although such patterns had not been observed in mammals. He also discovered that woodcutters in Indian forests have been known to wear masks on the backs of their heads to discourage any tigers hunting for prey. He had observed a lion stalking an impala, and noticed the predator gave up the chase when the prey spotted it. Lions are ambush hunters, Jordan reasoned, and decided to test his "detection hypothesis" that painting eyes on the butts of cows would discourage predatory behavior from the local lion population.