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Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) report new data that support the hypothesis that remdesivir, a drug with broad antiviral activity, may be a promising treatment against Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).

In the team’s experiments, remdesivir reduced the severity of disease, virus replication, and damage to the lungs when administered to infected monkeys. The authors suggest that it be considered for implementation in clinical trials and that it may also have utility for other, related coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2 (previously known as 2019-nCoV).

The experimental antiviral remdesivir successfully prevented disease in rhesus macaques infected with MERS-CoV. Remdesivir prevented disease when administered before infection and improved the condition of macaques when given after the animals already were infected.

Is it so outlandish to believe that countries in the future might resort to military force to prevent other countries from altering the shared genetic code of humanity? Many countries have been invaded for far less.

The genetics revolution that will transform our health care, the way we make babies, the nature of the babies we make, and ultimately our evolutionary trajectory as a species has already begun. Just like parents in many places will need to make tough choices about whether, if at all, to genetically engineer their children, states will be forced to make monumental collective decisions on these issues with potentially fateful consequences.

Continue reading “The designer baby debate could start a war” »

The synchronized footage, published online in January, was assembled by a mostly anonymous online group of sleuths called Osint HK, which has been keeping tabs on protesters and journalists’ often-violent encounters with police during the more than eight months of Hong Kong’s near-daily anti-government, pro-democracy protests. Osint HK has spent hours each day scouring social networks for videos and other media to document police misconduct across Hong Kong.

The protests are still happening, but they’ve slowed due to fears over the coronavirus, which has been spreading from China across the globe. So Osint HK more recently has begun focusing its efforts on educating the public about the virus.

“People are confused, and they don’t know where to turn,” says Trey Menefee, the founder and public face of Osint HK. “We are trying to be a trusted source of information, cutting through the fog to find out what did or didn’t happen.”

The gene-editing tool CRISPR has been used for the first time inside the body of an adult, in an attempt to cure a form of blindness.

The treatment: According to the Associated Press, doctors dripped just a few drops of a gene-editing mixture beneath the retina of a patient in Oregon who suffers from Leber congenital amaurosis, a rare inherited disease that leads to progressive vision loss.

Cells that take up the mixture can have their DNA permanently corrected, potentially restoring a degree of vision.

CRISPR Used To Edit Genes Inside A Patient With A Rare Form Of Blindness : Shots — Health News Doctors used CRISPR to edit genes of cells inside a patient’s eye, hoping to restore vision to a person blinded by a rare genetic disorder. A similar strategy might work for some brain diseases.

A compound found in oranges has been found to target obesity and reduce the risks of developing associated diseases, according to a new study. The researchers note that drinking enough orange juice every day may have a drastic impact on obesity as a result, even in cases where a high-fat and high-cholesterol diet is being consumed. The beneficial compound was also found to reduce the amount of plaque in arteries.

The scientific revolution was ushered in at the beginning of the 17th century with the development of two of the most important inventions in history — the telescope and the microscope. With the telescope, Galileo turned his attention skyward, and advances in optics led Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek toward the first use of the compound microscope as a scientific instrument, circa 1665. Today, we are witnessing an information technology-era revolution in microscopy, supercharged by deep learning algorithms that have propelled artificial intelligence to transform industry after industry.

One of the major breakthroughs in deep learning came in 2012, when the performance superiority of a deep convolutional neural network combined with GPUs for image classification was revealed by Hinton and colleagues [1] for the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). In AI’s current innovation and implementation phase, deep learning algorithms are propelling nearly all computer vision-intensive applications, including autonomous vehicles (transportation, military), facial recognition (retail, IT, communications, finance), biomedical imaging (healthcare), autonomous weapons and targeting systems (military), and automation and robotics (military, manufacturing, heavy industry, retail).

It should come as no surprise that the field of microscopy would ripe for transformation by artificial intelligence-aided image processing, analysis and interpretation. In biological research, microscopy generates prodigious amounts of image data; a single experiment with a transmission electron microscope can generate a data set containing over 100 terabytes worth of images [2]. The myriad of instruments and image processing techniques available today can resolve structures ranging in size across nearly 10 orders of magnitude, from single molecules to entire organisms, and capture spatial (3D) as well as temporal (4D) dynamics on time scales of femtoseconds to seconds.

Bottomline: DON’T PANIC!

This is a Cary prodocution!

Continue reading “How does Coronavirus compare to Ebola, SARS, etc?” »