Lifeboat Foundation

In the fight against Covid-19, cytokine storms are one of the most deadly factors that doctors are battling. This symptom in severe cases of the novel coronavirus can lead to excessive inflammation, swelling, pain, and loss of organ function. It can even cause the immune system to ramp up so much that it starts killing the body’s own cells — instead of just fighting the infection. In serious cases, this can lead to death, as we’ve seen in many cases of severe Covid-19.

In the last few months, researchers have been looking at whether cannabis, or it’s many chemical compounds, might help to fight this deadly effect by bringing down inflammation. Recently, we’ve seen positive results from studies suggesting that CBD, a compound in cannabis, may help fight these cytokine storms.

Now early results from an ongoing Israeli study are adding to the chorus of researchers suggesting that cannabis’ ingredients could be a game changing treatment in the fight against Covid-19. But this study says that terpenes, compounds that provide the aroma and flavor in cannabis and many other plants, may lead to even better results than CBD alone, and might outperform conventional treatments like corticosteroids. Reports from the study show that a combination of CBD with terpenes was 2 times more effective at inhibiting cytokine activity than dexamethasone, a corticosteroid which a recent study found to be an effective treatment for Covid-19 cytokine storms.

A temperature of 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius) recorded in California’s Death Valley on Sunday by the US National Weather Service could be the hottest ever measured with modern instruments, officials say.

The reading was registered at 3:41 pm at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center in the Death Valley national park by an automated observation system—an electronic thermometer encased inside a box in the shade.

In 1913, a weather station half an hour’s walk away recorded what officially remains the world record of 134 degrees Fahrenheit (56.7 degrees Celsius). But its validity has been disputed because a superheated sandstorm at the time may have skewed the reading.

Quantum computing requires meticulously prepared hardware and big budgets, but cloud-based solutions could make the technology available to broader business audiences Several tech giants are racing to achieve “quantum supremacy”, but reliability and consistency in quantum output is no simple trick Covid-19 has prompted some researchers to look at how quantum computing could mitigate future pandemics with scientific precision and speed Quantum computing (QC) has been theorized for decades and has evolved rapidly over the last few years. An escalation in spend and development has seen powerhouses IBM, Microsoft, and Google race for ‘quantum supremacy’ — whereby quantum reliably and consistently outperforms existing computers. But do quantum computers remain a sort of elitist vision of the future or are we on course for more financially and infrastructurally viable applications across industries?

Getting to grips with qubits How much do you know? Ordinary computers (even supercomputers) deploy bits, and these bits comprise of traditional binary code. Computer processes – like code – are made up of countless combinations of 0’s and 1’s. Quantum computers, however, are broken down into qubits. Qubits are capable of ‘superpositions’: effectively adopting both 1 and 0 simultaneously, or any space on the spectrum between these two formerly binary points. The key to a powerful, robust, and reliable quantum computer is more qubits. Every qubit added exponentially increases the processing capacity of the machine.

Qubits and the impact of the superposition give quantum computers the ability to process large datasets within seconds, doing what it would take humans decades to do. They can decode and deconstruct, hypothesize and validate, tackling problems of absurd complexity and dizzying magnitude — and can do so across many different industries.

Continue reading “The quantum state of play — cloud-based QCaaS and Covid-19” »

Background:Pantoea is a genus within the Enterobacterales whose members encompass free-living and host-associated lifestyles. Despite our growing understanding of the role of mobile genetic elements in the biology, ecology, and evolution of this bacterial group, few Pantoea bacteriophages have been identified and characterized.

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/phage.2019.

Background: Pantoea is a genus within the Enterobacterales whose members encompass free-living and host-associated lifestyles. Despite our growing understanding of the role of mobile genetic elements in the biology, ecology, and evolution of this bacterial group, few Pantoea bacteriophages have been identified and characterized.

Continue reading “Isolation and Characterization of vB_PagP-SK1, a T7-Like Phage Infecting Pantoea agglomerans” »

Behind all this doom and gloom, the current COVID-19 viral threat, dreaded climate disasters and feared robocalypse, it’s hard to see a bigger and amazingly brighter picture. Are we evolving into a new species with hybrid thinking, interlinked into the Global Mind? Once our neocortices are seamlessly connected to the Web, what will that feel like to step up one level above human consciousness to global consciousness? Any crisis, including the current one, is an opportunity to transcend the quagmire of status quo.

Are we evolving into a new species with hybrid thinking, interlinked into the Global Mind? At what point may the Web become self-aware? Once our neocortices are seamlessly connected to the Web, how will that feel like to step up one level above human consciousness to global consciousness?

In his book “The Global Brain” (2000) Howard Bloom argues that hyperconnected humans and machines resemble a lot the neurons of the “global brain,” and the coming Internet of Things (IoT) with trillions of sensors around the planet will become effectively the nervous system of Earth. According to the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock, we have always been an integral part of this “Meta-Mind,” collective consciousness, global adaptive and self-regulating system while tapping into vast resources of information pooling and at the same time having a “shared hallucination,” we call reality.

Continue reading “Holo Syntellectus: Are We Evolving into a New Cybernetic Species Interlinked into the Global Mind?” »

“These findings reveal how the immune system goes awry during coronavirus infections, leading to severe disease, and point to potential therapeutic targets,” said Bali Pulendran, Ph.D., professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology and the senior author of the study, which will be published Aug. 11 in Science.

Lead authorship is shared by Stanford postdoctoral scholars Prabhu Arnunachalam, Ph.D., and Florian Wimmers, Ph.D.; and Chris Ka Pun Mok, Ph.D., and Mahen Perera, Ph.D., both assistant professors of public health laboratory sciences at the University of Hong Kong.

A Stanford study shows that in severely ill COVID-19 patients, “first-responder” immune cells, which should react immediately to signs of viruses or bacteria in the body, instead respond sluggishly.

Continue reading “Study reveals immune-system paralysis in severe COVID-19 cases” »

Instead of recruiting whole phages into phage therapy armies, antibacterial campaigns may simply requisition the organisms’ battle-tested cell-wall-breaching enzymes.

It was 1917 when Felix d’Herelle, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, first proposed using bacteriophages (or phages)—viruses that infect bacteria—as a therapy for human bacterial infections. Although used for decades in parts of Europe, notably Russia, Poland, and the Republic of Georgia, phage therapy is only permitted in the United States under the “compassionate use” umbrella—when there is nothing else available.

The rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria that defy traditional antibiotics has forced clinicians to seek alternative measures to curb deadly infections. Two cases made headlines in recent years. In 2016, the life of Thomas Patterson, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, was saved by phage therapy after he developed a deadly Acinetobacter baumannii infection. (The story is recounted in The Perfect Predator, the book that Patterson co-authored with his wife, epidemiologist Steffanie A. Strathdee, PhD.) Last year, the life of an English teenager was saved after she developed an infection following a lung transplant for cystic fibrosis.

Continue reading “Lysins Unlimited: Phages’ Secret Weapon” »

Our mindset is everything: what one person sees as a crisis, another person sees as opportunity.

The magnitude of economic and social disruption caused by COVID-19 (25% of small businesses have closed, bankruptcies are up 26%) means that many existing business models are being upended. In some cases, entire industries.

As an entrepreneur, you should be asking yourself: What challenges or problems can I solve? What are new digital business models I want to experiment with?

The YSPH-developed test, called SalivaDirect, has been used as part of an NBA testing program and will now be available to more diagnostic laboratories.