SCIENCE sciencemag.org
cost $100, and laboratories often take days to
provide results. The genetic tests and other,
antigen-based ones require specialized lab
equipment; Abbott’s does not, although a
health care professional must administer it.
The company says it plans to produce 50 mil-
lion tests in October. Last week, the Trump
administration announced it would buy 150
million. The United States currently conducts
about 700,000 tests for the virus per day.
CDC relaxes testing guidelines
POLICY | The U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) drew criti-
cism last week for revising its guidelines to
state that people exposed to the virus that
causes COVID-19 “do not necessarily need a
test” if they lack symptoms and do not have
medical conditions that make them vulner-
able. Scientists and public health specialists
slammed the 24 August revision, noting
that people who do not feel sick can still
spread the virus and that the United States
continues to lead the world in COVID-
cases and deaths. Trump administration
officials have said too many people have been
getting tested out of fear and tests should
be reserved for those at highest risk, The
New York Times reported. But CDC Director
Robert Redfield appeared to muddy the mes-
sage when he said on 26 August that testing
“may be considered for all close contacts of
confirmed or probable COVID-19 patients.”
Virus hunters get new money
INFECTIOUS DISEASES | The EcoHealth
Alliance, a nonprofit whose highly scored
grant to study bat coronaviruses that could
jump to humans in China was summarily
defunded after President Donald Trump
targeted it, has received new funding worth
$7.5 million over 5 years, the U.S. National
Institutes of Health (NIH) announced last
week. In April, Trump alleged without
evidence that the COVID-19 virus escaped
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology; the
EcoHealth Alliance had collaborated with
scientists there on the canceled grant. NIH
ended it days later, drawing strong protests
from scientists. The newly funded work will
not revive the earlier project but instead will
focus on risks of animal viruses jumping to
humans in Southeast Asia, but not China.
The EcoHealth Alliance is one of 11 groups
NIH plans to fund with $82 million to study
such risks. “It’s a relief for us to know that
NIH isn’t going to black-ball our organization
because of political interference,” EcoHealth
Alliance President Peter Daszak says.
T
he United States will establish a dozen centers to study artificial in-
telligence (AI) and quantum information science (QIS), the White
House announced last week. The seven university-based AI cen-
ters will receive $20 million each over 5 years from the National
Science Foundation or the Department of Agriculture and will
use AI—algorithms that can learn to recognize patterns—to tackle
problems in areas ranging from farming to particle physics. The five cen-
ters on QIS, located at the Department of Energy’s national laboratories,
will focus on topics such as developing quantum computers that could
solve challenges that would overwhelm conventional computers. Each of
these centers will receive $125 million over 5 years, as Congress called for
in the 2018 National Quantum Initiative Act.COMPUTER SCIENCEUnited States boosts AI, quantum research
China’s R&D budget keeps rising
FUNDING | China continued in 2019
its yearslong run of double-digit annual
percentage increases in spending on
R&D. But it has not yet reached its long-
standing goal of increasing R&D expen-
ditures to 2.5% of gross domestic product
(GDP). Total public and private science
and technology expenditures in 2019 rose
12.5% to 2.21 trillion Chinese yuan ($
billion), the National Bureau of Statistics
of China reported last week. Most (83%)
went to development, while basic research
received 6% and applied research 11%.
Relative to other countries, China has
been spending more on development
and less on basic research. Its total R&D
spending in 2019 amounted to 2.23%
of GDP, still short of the United States’s
2.83%. China was the world’s second big-
gest spender on R&D behind the UnitedStates in 2018, the latest year for which a
comparison is available, according to the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development. Analysts expect China
to continue to close the gap.Intermediate black hole found
ASTRONOMY | Gravitational wave hunt-
ers have netted a big fish: the signal from
a pair of black holes merging to produce
one with a mass of about 142 Suns.
That heft makes it the first confirmed
intermediate-mass black hole, with a
mass between those produced by col-
lapsing stars and the giant black holes at
the hearts of galaxies. Detected in May
2019 by the twin Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-wave Observatory facili-
ties in the United States and the Virgo
detector in Italy, the merger is also the
most distant seen, at 7 billion light-years
away, as well as the most powerful, with
the mass of eight Suns converted into
energy. The masses of the individual black
holes—85 and 66 solar masses—before
they merged pose a puzzle, as theorists
believe it impossible to make a black hole
heavier than 65 Suns from the collapse
of a single star. The discovery is reported
this week in Physical Review Letters and
The Astrophysical Journal Letters.Iran allows nuclear inspections
NONPROLIFERATION | After a
monthslong impasse, Iran has agreed
to allow international inspectors access
to two sites that were allegedly part of
a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
The move preserves, for now, what
remains of a multination nuclear deal
reached in 2015, from which the Trumpmillion
Square kilometers of sea floor
changed by human activities, such
as the construction of ports,
communication cables, oil rigs, and wind
farms, as of 2018, representing an
e stimated 1.5% of all coastal areas.WHY IT MATTERS
The modified area equals that of
cities on land, and its marine
ecosystems may have sustained damage
(Nature Sustainability).BY THE NUMBERSSCIENCEMAG.ORG/TAGS/CORONAVIRUS
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4 SEPTEMBER 2020 • VOL 369 ISSUE 6508 1149
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