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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,556

Substantial transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection occurred in the population of Wuhan in December 2019 with most cases reported in the second half of that month. Many early reported cases were associated with Huanan Market, indicating that it was one of the focus of the transmission. Nevertheless, transmission was also occurring elsewhere in Wuhan at the same time.

It is not possible on the basis of the current epidemiological information to determine how the SARS-CoV-2 was introduced into the Huanan Market. Substantial transmission of SARS-CoV-2 infection occurred among the population of Wuhan in December 2019.

While some of the early cases had an association with the Huanan Seafood Market, others were associated with other markets and other cases have no market association at all. It is likely that Huanan Seafood Market acted as a focus for transmission of the virus, but there are also transmissions appearing to have the occurrence elsewhere in Wuhan at the same time. This is our basic judgment. It is not possible on the basis of the current information to determine how SARS-CoV-2 was introduced into the Huanan Market.

The third part of my introduction will be the research of the animal environment group, the third group of our joint mission. Coronaviruses that phylogenetically relate to SARS-CoV-2 have been identified in different animals, including horseshoe bats and pangolins. Sampling of bats in Hubei Province, however, has failed to identify evidence of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses and sampling of wildlife in different places in China has so far failed to identify the presence of SARS-CoV-2.

Publicaciones de la organización mundial de la salud.

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April 2020…

Daszak says the China bat sampling project has already racked up quite a number of successes. The team and its collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have collected about 15000 samples from bats. From these they have already identified about 400 wholly new coronaviruses. About 50 of those fall into a category that caused the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers were also able to demonstrate that at least some of the new bat coronaviruses they have found are capable of infecting a human cell in a petri dish. Then the team sampled the blood of people in China who live near various bat caves. They found evidence that for some time now, these bat coronaviruses have been spilling over into the human population.

Updated on May 1 at 10:50 a.m. ET

The U.S. government has suddenly terminated funding for a years-long research project in China that many experts say is vital to preventing the next major coronavirus outbreak.

The project was run by a U.S. nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance. For more than a decade, the group has been sending teams to China to trap bats, collect samples of their blood, saliva and feces, and then check those samples for new coronaviruses that could spark the next global pandemic. The idea is to identify locations that need to be monitored, come up with strategies to prevent spillover of the virus into human populations and get a jump on creating vaccines and treatments. Already the project has identified hundreds of coronaviruses, including one very similar to the virus behind the current outbreak.

Continue reading “Why The U.S. Government Stopped Funding A Research Project On Bats And Coronaviruses” | >

Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who’s Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, is now predicting a 50% chance that people will begin retaining their youthful state via advanced science and technologies by the year 2036.

This is roughly around the same timeline that The Last Generation to Die is based on. Nailed it (hopefully)!

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High-precision delivery of microrobots at the whole-body scale is of considerable importance for efforts toward targeted therapeutic intervention. However, vision-based control of microrobots, to deep and narrow spaces inside the body, remains a challenge. Here, we report a soft and resilient magnetic cell microrobot with high biocompatibility that can interface with the human body and adapt to the complex surroundings while navigating inside the body. We achieve time-efficient delivery of soft microrobots using an integrated platform called endoscopy-assisted magnetic actuation with dual imaging system (EMADIS).

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Wiesendanger points out that unlike SARS and MERS, no intermediate host between bats and humans has been found more than a year since the start of the pandemic. Thus far, there is no evidence for the zoonotic theory to explain the outbreak.

Indeed, during the joint China-WHO report issued on Feb. 9, Liang Wannian, head of the Chinese National Health Commission’s Expert Panel of COVID-19 Response, stated that 50000 samples of wild animals from 300 different species (including bats) as well as 11000 farm animals in 31 Chinese provinces — taken between November 2019 and March 2020 — had all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19.

The researcher claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is “astonishingly effective” at binding to human receptor cells (hACE2). He said this is due to its special hACE2 binding domains paired with the furin cleavage sites of the virus’ telltale spike protein.

He stated that this is the first time a coronavirus has exhibited both characteristics and that it points to a “non-natural origin.” Within the betacoronaviruses of sarbecovirus lineage B, the polybasic furin cleavage site is unique to SARS-CoV-2, according to News Medical Life Sciences.

Wiesendanger noted that there were no bats sold at the infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the first known superspreader event began. Liang has stated that no animals or “animal products” had tested positive for the virus there and that individuals who contracted COVID early on had not visited the market.”

Continue reading “German scientist says 99.9% chance coronavirus leaked from Wuhan lab” | >

Summary: A new technique which involves fusing human and chimpanzee skin cells that have been modified to act like stem cells, allowed researchers to identify two novel genetic differences between humans and chimps.

Source: Stanford University.

One of the best ways to study human evolution is by comparing us with nonhuman species that, evolutionarily speaking, are closely related to us. That closeness can help scientists narrow down precisely what makes us human, but that scope is so narrow it can also be extremely hard to define. To address this complication, researchers from Stanford University have developed a new technique for comparing genetic differences.

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Tyson’s latest book “Cosmic Queries” covers the gamut from early Earth’s pond scum to potential multiverses to out-of-the-box ideas about the potential that we live in a false vacuum cosmos.

After the past year’s pandemic pall, it’s nice to be reminded that we remain inextricably connected to the cosmos beyond Earth’s atmosphere. In the new book “Cosmic Queries: StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going,” astrophysicist and StarTalk podcast host Neil DeGrasse Tyson, along with George Mason University physics professor James Trefil, clearly remind us of our cosmic legacy.

Tyson, Director of New York City’s Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, is well known for his ability to provoke the public into thinking harder about our place in the cosmos. And “Cosmic Queries” does just that. Tyson and Trefil succinctly lead the reader through almost every aspect of cosmic history while addressing age-old questions with new verve.

Designed with a wealth of graphic and color images with pithy captions, the book is also peppered with amusing tweets from Tyson’s own Twitter account over the last decade. The book and his tweets touch on some of StarTalk’s recurring themes, such as Why is the universe the way it is? Are we alone? And how it all began and how it might all end?

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“The research is part of an explosion of new techniques and ideas for studying early development. Today, in the same issue of Nature, two other research groups are reporting a leap forward in creating ”artificial” human embryos.

Those teams managed to coax ordinary skin cells and stem cells to self-assemble into look-alike early human embryos they call ”blastoids,” which they grew for about 10 days in the lab. Several kinds of artificial models of embryos have been described before, but those described today are among the most complete, because they possess the cells needed to form a placenta. That means they are a step closer to being viable human embryos that could develop further, even until birth.

Scientists say that they would never try to establish a pregnancy with artificial embryos—an act that would be forbidden today in most countries.

Researchers are growing embryos outside the body longer than has ever been possible.

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