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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,913

There Won’t Be Enough COVID Vaccines for Everybody Until 2024, Warn Vaccine Makers

O,.o.

“It’s going to take four to five years until everyone gets the vaccine on this planet,” Adar Poonawalla, chief executive of the Serum Institute of India, told the newspaper.

Dragging down the feasibility, Poonwalla says that such a vaccine would likely need to include a second booster shot, like for the measles or rotavirus vaccine. That would mean 15 billion doses in total for the entire globe.

“I know the world wants to be optimistic on it… [but] I have not heard of anyone coming even close to that [level] right now,” Poonawalla added.

New Graphene Face Masks Offer Very High Anti-bacterial Efficiency, Deactivation of Coronaviruses

Anti-bacterial efficiency close to 100% under 10-min sunlight and promising results in deactivation of coronaviruses.

Face masks have become an important tool in fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic. However, improper use or disposal of masks may lead to “secondary transmission.” A research team from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has successfully produced graphene masks with an anti-bacterial efficiency of 80%, which can be enhanced to almost 100% with exposure to sunlight for around 10 minutes. Initial tests also showed very promising results in the deactivation of two species of coronaviruses. The graphene masks are easily produced at low cost, and can help to resolve the problems of sourcing raw materials and disposing of non-biodegradable masks.

The research is conducted by Dr. Ye Ruquan, Assistant Professor from CityU’s Department of Chemistry, in collaboration with other researchers. The findings were published in the scientific journal ACS Nano, titled “Self-Reporting and Photothermally Enhanced Rapid Bacterial Killing on a Laser-Induced Graphene Mask.”

Meet This Year’s WIRED25: People Who Are Making Things Better

When Sartre said hell is other people, he wasn’t living through 2020. Right now, other people are the only thing between us and species collapse. Not just the people we occasionally encounter behind fugly masks—but the experts and innovators out in the world, leading the way. The 17-year-old hacker building his own coronavirus tracker. The Google AI wonk un-coding machine bias. A former IT guy helping his community thwart surveillance. There are people everywhere, in and out … See More.

The scientists, technologists, artists, and chefs who are standing between us and species collapse.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink — The Dark Side

TLDR: Scroll down to Conclusions.

Elon Musk has recently unveiled his company’s first Neuralink device implanted in an experimental animal — a pig.

To briefly describe the device for those without much technical knowledge, it is an invasive technology based on the concept of a neural lace, which is a mesh of perhaps hundreds of wires laced throughout the brain albeit with concentration of connections in certain areas. These either sample neural patterns or modify them. Needless to say, even the minor technical challenges are massive. For example, it involves brain surgery. Then we have bio-compatibility problems as typically implanted electrodes tend to cause the tissues around them to die back. Finally, actually transferring massive amounts of data through the skull to and from an implanted and (presumably) powered computer. Elon Musk may well be able to solve these problems since they are not new technical challenges and a considerable amount of work has already been done in this area. Even automating the brain surgery may well be feasible using robotics.

Glial Cells Play an Active Role in the Nervous System

Summary: Glial cells not only control the speed of nerve conduction, but they also influence the precision of signal transduction.

Source: University of Münster

For the brain to work efficiently, it is important that a nerve impulse arrives at its destination as quickly and as precisely as possible. It has been long been known that the nerve fibres — also known as axons — pass on these impulses. In the course of evolution, an insulating sheath — myelin — developed around the axons which increases the speed of conduction. This insulating sheath is formed by the second type of cell in the nervous system — the glial cells, which are one of the main components of the brain. If, as a result of disease, myelin is depleted, this leads to neurological disorders such as Multiple Sclerosis or Morbus Charcot-Marie-Tooth.

Canada reports no new deaths from coronavirus for the first time since March

Canada reported no new deaths from COVID-19 on Friday for the first time in six months. The last time the country reported no new deaths from the virus on March 15, at the start of lockdowns in North America due to the pandemic, Reuters reports.

As of Friday evening, over 6 million people had been tested for COVID-19 in Canada, 2.1% of which came back positive. Some 702 new cases were reported on Friday, but no new deaths, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported.

Antiviral Drug Remdesivir Can Help Fight the Coronavirus, But Can Patients Get It?

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.”

Quiet Anthropocene, quiet Earth

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.

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