Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 1801

The Black Death (1347−1350) was a pandemic that devastated the populations of Europe and Asia. The plague was an unprecedented human tragedy in Italy. It not only shook Italian society but transformed it. The Black Death marked an end of an era in Italy, its impact was profound, and it resulted in wide-ranging social, economic, cultural and religious changes.[1] These changes, directly and indirectly, led to the emergence of the Renaissance, one of the greatest epochs for art, architecture, and literature in human history.

The Impact of the Plague of Italy

To Black Death spread to Italy from modern-day Russia. Genoese merchants spread the plague while fleeing a Mongol attack on their trading post in Crimea. The plague was carried and spread by the fleas that lived on the Black Rat and brought to Italy on the Genoese ships.[2] The population of Italy was ill prepared for the spread of the disease. There had been a series of famine and food shortages in the region, and the population was weak and vulnerable to disease, and furthermore, the population did not have any natural resistance to the disease. Italy was the most urbanized society in Europe, Milan, Rome, Florence, and other Italian centers among the largest on the continent.[3].

Read more | >

Shahrad Daraeikia, Jack Wang, and Dr. Jean-Philippe Buerckert sit down together with Harry Glorikian at MoneyBall Medicine to talk about our ultra rapid antibody discovery race to a cure for COVID19.

Episode Summary

Distributed Bio aims to use its computational antibody engineering platform to identify antibodies that protect against SARS and optimize them to block the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus. This week Harry gets a progress update from three key Distributed Bioscientists.

Continue reading “How Data Is Critical to Engineering Antibodies to Block COVID-19” | >

Hey all! I hope you are doing fine despite the coronavirus outbreak! I have just made a video about what the world will look like immediately after the coronavirus outbreak. If this is interesting to you, please check it out!

Ever wondered what the world will look like after the corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic is over? In this video, I go over how our society could change for years or even decades to come after the corona virus pandemic is over. Topics I talk about include how religion, education, lifestyle, and automation after the pandemic.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_futurist_tom/

Continue reading “What Will The World Look Like After the Corona Virus?” | >

Europe’s largest steel mill is in the city of Taranto in southern Italy. In its heyday, the ILVA steel plant produced more than 10 million tons of steel every year—about 40 percent of all the steel made in Italy—and it currently employs about 12,000 people.

This is no small deal in an area where unemployment is north of 20 percent; indeed, the local economy of Taranto, population 200,000, is almost entirely dependent on the steel mill —which is also one of the biggest and most deadly polluters of anywhere in the Mediterranean.

The plant is a notorious source of dioxin, and dust from the plant is believed to be the reason why Taranto has a lung cancer rate 30 percent higher than the national average. It’s so toxic that farmers have been forbidden from raising livestock within a 20-kilometer radius of the plant; in 2008, the government ordered the slaughter of thousands of sheep and other animals that were found to have excessively high levels of dioxin.

Read more | >

Two new studies by researchers in Tel Aviv University and Harvard University on the subject were published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering on Monday.

Organs-on-a-chip were first developed in 2010 at Harvard University. Then, scientists took cells from a specific human organ — heart, brain, kidney and lung — and used tissue engineering techniques to put them in a plastic cartridge, or the so called chip. Despite the use of the term chip, which often refers to microchips, no computer parts are involved here.

Get The Start-Up Israel’s Daily Start-Up by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up.

Read more | >

Drexel University researchers have reported a method to quickly identify and label mutated versions of the virus that causes COVID-19. Their preliminary analysis, using information from a global database of genetic information gleaned from coronavirus testing, suggests that there are at least six to 10 slightly different versions of the virus infecting people in America, some of which are either the same as, or have subsequently evolved from, strains directly from Asia, while others are the same as those found in Europe.

First developed as a way of parsing to get a snapshot of the mix of bacteria, the genetic analysis tool teases out patterns from volumes of genetic information and can identify whether a virus has genetically changed. They can then use the pattern to categorize viruses with using tags called Informative Subtype Markers (ISM).

Applying the same method to process viral genetic data can quickly detect and categorize slight genetic variations in the SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the group reported in a paper recently posted on the preliminary research archive, bioRxiv. The genetic analysis tool that generates these labels is publicly available for COVID-19 researchers on GitHub.

Read more | >