Lifeboat Foundation

More than 100,000 coronavirus cases have been reported to the World Health Organization in the last 24 hours, “the most in a single day since the outbreak began,” director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at a news conference Wednesday.

“We still have a long way to go in this pandemic,” he said. “In the last 24 hours, there have been 106,000 cases reported to WHO — the most in a single day since the outbreak began.”

Tedros added that almost “two-thirds of these cases were reported in just four countries,” although he did not specify where the cases had been recorded.

Circa 2019

Cerebral palsy is a condition that results from injuries or abnormalities of the brain, usually in the womb but occurring any time during 2 years after birth. It affects brain and nervous system functions such as thinking, seeing, hearing, learning and movement.

Continue reading “Stem Cell Therapy for Cerebral Palsy” »

After biomedical scientists demonstrated that they could make dangerous viruses like influenza even more dangerous, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented a three-year moratorium on funding such research. But a couple of months ago, in December, the moratorium was lifted, and a tight set of rules were put in its place, such as a mandate for oversight panels.

The prospect of engineering a deadly pandemic virus in a laboratory suggests that only a fool would wish away government regulation entirely.

However, as a whole, regulation has done more harm than good in the arena of scientific innovation. The reason is that the sort of person who thinks like a bureaucratic regulator isn’t the sort of person who thinks like a scientist. The sad fact of the matter is that those most interested in the regulatory process tend to be motivated by politics and ideology rather than scientific inquiry and technological progress.

As technology has developed over the last few years, the size of wind turbines has increased.

Last December, for example, Dutch utility Eneco started to purchase power produced by the prototype of GE Renewable Energy’s Haliade-X 12 MW wind turbine. That turbine has a capacity of 12 MW, a height of 260 meters and a blade length of 107 meters.

The announcement of Siemens Gamesa’s new turbine plans comes against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, which is impacting renewable energy companies around the world.

Apple’s AR glasses are supposedly called Apple Glass, a leaker revealed, and the product is set to be unveiled during the iPhone 12 launch event. The coronavirus health crisis might force Apple to postpone the reveal to the first quarter of next year.

(Reuters) — U.S. immunotherapy company Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc (INO.O) said on Wednesday its experimental vaccine to prevent coronavirus infection produced protective antibodies and immune system responses in mice and guinea pigs.

Blood samples from the patient, who had SARS in 2003, contained an antibody that appeared to block the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.

The pandemic COVID-19 has spread to all over the world and greatly threatens safety and health of people. COVID-19 is highly infectious and with high mortality rate. As no effective antiviral treatment is currently available, new drugs are urgently needed. We employed transcriptional analysis to uncover potential antiviral drugs from natural products or FDA approved drugs. We found liquiritin significantly inhibit replication of SARS-CoV-2 in Vero E6 cells with EC₅₀ = 2.39 μM. Mechanistically, we found liquiritin exerts anti-viral function by mimicking type I interferon. Upregulated genes induced by liquiritin are enriched in GO categories including type I interferon signaling pathway, negative regulation of viral genome replication and etc. In toxicity experiment, no death was observed when treated at dose of 300 mg/kg for a week in ICR mice. All the organ indexes but liver and serum biochemical indexes were normal after treatment. Liquiritin is abundant in licorice tablet (~0.2% by mass), a traditional Chinese medicine. Together, we recommend liquiritin as a competitive candidate for treating COVID-19. We also expect liquiritin to have a broad and potent antiviral function to other viral pathogens, like HBV, HIV and etc.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

A gene therapy trial performed on mice may foreshadow yet another way to hack fitness. In a study done by a team at Washington University in St. Louis’ medical school, mice quickly built muscle mass and reduced obesity after receiving the therapy, even while eating a diet high in fat and not exercising. The results were published last week in a paper in Science Advances.

The gene targeted was FST, which is responsible for making a protein called follistatin. In humans and most other mammals, follistatin helps grow muscle and control metabolism by blocking a protein called myostatin, which acts to restrain muscle growth and ensure muscles don’t get too big.

The researchers injected eight-week-old mice with a virus carrying a healthy FST gene (gene therapy involves adding healthy copies of a gene to cells, usually using a virus as a deliveryman).

Continue reading “Forget Exercise—These Mice Got Ripped With Gene Therapy” »