Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,835

An early analysis of the data, which did not include patients enrolled later in the trial, found that median time to recovery was 11 days for patients on remdesivir and 15 days for patients on placebo. It also suggested a lower death rate, 8 percent on remdesivir compared to 11.6 percent on placebo, but that difference was just short of statistical significance.

UCSF and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital together enrolled about 30 patients in the NIH trial. Because the trial was double-blinded, neither the doctors nor the patients knew which patients received remdesivir or placebo. With survival rates in San Francisco relatively high compared to harder hit cities, it was hard to attribute any specific improvement to the drug, said Chin-Hong and Doernberg, who both cared for patients in the trial.

“We’re talking about a couple days of faster recovery overall, so in any one particular patient, that may not be so apparent,” said Doernberg. “This is why you have to do large trials.”

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Our planet vibrates incessantly, sometimes with notable but more often with imperceptible intensity. Conventional seismology attempts to decipher vibrational sources and path effects by studying seismograms—records of vibrations measured with seismometers. In doing so, scientists seek either to understand the tectonic processes that lead to strong ground motions and earthquake failure (1) or to probe otherwise inaccessible planetary interiors (2). Progress in these areas of research typically has relied on the rare and geographically irregular occurrence of large earthquakes. However, anthropogenic (human) activities at Earth’s surface also generate seismic waves that instruments can detect over great distances. On page 1338 of this issue, Lecocq et al. (3) report on a quieting of anthropogenic vibrations since the start of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic.

http://www.sciencemag.org/about/science-licenses-journal-article-reuse

This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.

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Cutting calories significantly may not be an easy task for most, but it’s tied to a host of health benefits ranging from longer lifespan to a much lower chance of developing cancer, heart disease, diabetes and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

A new study from teams led by Scripps Research Professors Bruno Conti, Ph.D., and Gary Siuzdak, Ph.D., illuminates the critical role that temperature plays in realizing these diet-induced health benefits. Through their findings, the scientists pave the way toward creating a medicinal compound that imitates the valuable effects of reduced body temperature.

The research appears in Science Signaling.

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For college students studying science, doing labwork as part of their classes is a vital way to learn research skills and better understand concepts from lectures.

That presents a challenge for schools that are operating remotely during the coronavirus pandemic — so some biology programs are mailing brains, eyeballs, and even entire fetal pigs to their students so they can dissect them at home.

At Lafayette College, neuroscience students enrolled in a physiology course recently received packages in the mail that contained preserved sheep brains, which are commonly chosen by schools due to their close resemblance to human brains. Then, neuroscientist and psychologist Luis Schettino — who, in the interest of transparency, was one of my professors when I attended Lafayette — guided his students over a video call as they dissected the brains.

Special delivery!

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Recently, San Diego Zoo partnered up with the wildlife preservation group Revive and Restore and a pet cloning company ViaGen Equine to create an exact copy of Kuporovic. The embryo was planted in a surrogate mother, a common horse.

Shawn Walker, the chief science officer at ViaGen Equine reports “This new Przewalski’s colt was born fully healthy and reproductively normal. He is head butting and kicking when his space is challenged, and he is demanding milk supply from his surrogate mother.”

This whole deal is not only good news for Przewalski’s horses, because this project demonstrates that we can keep genetic material viable for many years. Thus principles we see in action see here can potentially be applied to other endangered, even extinct species. Yes, you’ve read that right, Revive and Restore hopes to revive a wooly mammoth one day.

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When the COVID-19 shutdown began in March throughout the United States, my team at Adobe had to face a stark reality: Business as usual was no longer an option. Suddenly, over just a single weekend, we had to shift our global workforce of over 22,000 people to working remotely. Not surprisingly, our existing processes and workflows weren’t equipped for this abrupt change. Customers, employees, and partners — many also working at home — couldn’t wait days to receive answers to urgent questions.

We realized pretty quickly that the only way to meet their needs was to completely rethink our support infrastructure.

Our first step was to launch an organization-wide open Slack channel that would tie together the IT organization and the entire Adobe employee community. Our 24×7 global IT help desk would front the support on that channel, while the rest of IT was made available for rapid event escalation.

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