Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,850
We are cousins of bats lol.
Dr David Haussler, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator working at University of California, Santa Cruz, co-authors report on computer analysis designed to reconstruct genome of 80-million-year-old mammal; holds that program has 98.5 percent accuracy rate and over next four years will formulate entire genome of ancestral mammal from total of 37 current mammalian species, including humans; research is published in journal Genome Research; graph (M)
Discussion with A biologist answering about Covid in quite a lot of detail.
World Economic Forum
As of 23 March, there were 336,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the world, with more than 250,000 cases outside China. Despite these numbers, much is still misunderstood or unknown about the virus which has brought regions of the globe to a standstill and placed huge pressure on the global economy.
Even what we do know – that elderly people are more at risk, that this is a new virus but resembles other known epidemics, that it is highly infectious – requires more explanation.
Here, Belgian virologist Guido Vanham, the former head of virology at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, helps answer questions about COVID-19’s origins, its behaviour and its future.
Fyodor R…
Abstract Immunity is the state of protection against infectious disease conferred either through an immune response generated by immunization or previous infection or by other non-immunological factors. This article reviews active and passive immunity and the differences between them: it also describes the four different commercially available vaccine types (live attenuated, killed/inactivated, subunit and toxoid): it also looks at how these different vaccines generate an adaptive immune response.
WASHINGTON — The Space Enterprise Consortium — an organization created in 2017 to attract space companies to work on military contracts — is canvassing firms to gauge the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on businesses.
The consortium known as SpEC is run by the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles. It has more than 350 member companies, many of them space startups and small businesses.
In an April 15 email the consortium asked members to identify those that have fewer than 50 employees.
As our body’s largest and most prominent organ, the skin also provides one of our most fundamental connections to the world around us. From the moment we’re born, it is intimately involved in every physical interaction we have.
Though scientists have studied the sense of touch, or haptics, for more than a century, many aspects of how it works remain a mystery.
“The sense of touch is not fully understood, even though it is at the heart of our ability to interact with the world,” said UC Santa Barbara haptics researcher Yon Visell. “Anything we do with our hands—picking up a glass, signing our name or finding keys in our bag—none of that is possible without the sense of touch. Yet we don’t fully understand the nature of the sensations captured by the skin or how they are processed in order to enable perception and action.”
John Horton Conway, a legendary mathematician who stood out for his love of games and for bringing mathematics to the masses, died on Saturday, April 11, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from complications related to COVID-19. He was 82.
Known for his unbounded curiosity and enthusiasm for subjects far beyond mathematics, Conway was a beloved figure in the hallways of Princeton’s mathematics building and at the Small World coffee shop on Nassau Street, where he engaged with students, faculty and mathematical hobbyists with equal interest.
Conway, who joined the faculty in 1987, was the John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics and a professor of mathematics until 2013 when he transferred to emeritus status.