The end of the year in cybersecurity mirrored the wider world by concluding in catastrophe: With more than 10000 people dying every day from Covid-19, a highly sophisticated electronic espionage campaign targeted U.S. government agencies and critical private industry, all customers of a single company: SolarWinds.
But there are some champions trying to make the online world a safer place. Our inaugural Forbes Cybersecurity Awards celebrate their achievements.
Jason Asbahr.
Reese Jones
New research suggests that electrophysiological brain signals associated with neural plasticity could help explain the rapid, antidepressant effects of the drug ketamine. The findings, European Neuropsychopharmacology, indicate that ketamine could reverse insensitivity to prediction error in depression.
In other words, the drug may help to alleviate depression by making it easier for patients to update their model of reality.
“Ketamine is exciting because of its potential to both treat, and better understand depression. This is largely because ketamine doesn’t work the way ordinary antidepressants do – its primary mechanism isn’t to increase monoamines in the brain like serotonin, and so ketamine gives us new insight into other potential mechanisms underlying depression,” said lead researcher Rachael Sumner, a postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Auckland School of Pharmacy.
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The Hallmarks of Aging are well established, but what is less discussed is the impact of microbes and/or microbial products. The bacterial metabolite, LPS, increases during aging, and it negatively impacts mitochondrial function, thereby demonstrating a role for microbial products on one of the Hallmarks of Aging, mitochondrial dysfunction.
HONG KONG—China is aggressively advancing alternative theories about the source of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, muddying the waters as the World Health Organization prepares to launch a long-awaited investigation into the origins of the pandemic. In recent weeks, Chinese state media, often suggesting the virus came from outside China, have seized on a series of recent studies that show it was spreading outside the country earlier than first assumed. Government officials have also pushed the theory that the virus could have hitched a ride into the central Chinese city of Wuhan on frozen-food imports. After outbreaks in multiple Chinese cities in recent months including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and elsewhere, authorities pointed to frozen-food packaging as the potential origin. https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-pushes-alternative-theori…1607445463
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TORONTO (AP) — Officials in Canada’s most populous province have confirmed the first two known Canadian cases of a more contagious variant of COVID-19 that was first identified in the United Kingdom.
The province’s associate chief medical officer says that the cases are a couple from Durham Region, just east of Toronto, with no known travel history, exposure or high-risk contacts.
The new variant is believed to spread more easily and faster than the original version of the disease but is not believed to be more deadly.
NASA scientists and their colleagues are now proposing corporate financing for a human mission to Mars. This raises the prospect that a spaceship named the Microsoft Explorer or the Google Search Engine could one day go down in history as the first spaceship to bring humans to the Red Planet.
The proposal suggests that companies could drum up $160 billion for a human mission to Mars and a colony there, rather than having governments fund such a mission with tax dollars.
Joel Levine, a senior research scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, was quoted in a release in the Journal of Cosmology by Dr. Rhawn Joseph. The plan covers “every aspect of a journey to the Red Planet — the design of the spacecrafts, medical health and psychological issues, the establishment of a Mars base, colonization, and a revolutionary business proposal to overcome the major budgetary obstacles which have prevented the U.S. from sending astronauts to Mars,” said Levine.
UV light-emitting diodes (UV LEDs) are an emerging technology and a UV source for pathogen inactivation, however low UV-LED wavelengths are costly and have low fluence rate. Our results suggest that the sensitivity of human Coronavirus (HCoV-OC43 used as SARS-CoV-2 surrogate) was wavelength dependent with 267 nm ~ 279 nm 286 nm 297 nm. Other viruses showed similar results, suggesting UV LED with peak emission at ~286 nm could serve as an effective tool in the fight against human Coronaviruses.
One of the most consumed drugs in the US – and the most commonly taken analgesic worldwide – could be doing a lot more than simply taking the edge off your headache, recent evidence suggests.
Acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol and sold widely under the brand names Tylenol and Panadol, also increases risk-taking, according to a September 2020 study that measured changes in people’s behaviour when under the influence of the common over-the-counter medication.
“Acetaminophen seems to make people feel less negative emotion when they consider risky activities – they just don’t feel as scared,” said neuroscientist Baldwin Way from The Ohio State University in September 2020.
Severe allergy-like reactions in at least eight people who received the COVID-19 vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech (and Moderna now) over the past 2 weeks may be due to a compound in the packaging of the messenger RNA (mRNA) that forms the vaccine’s main ingredient, scientists say. A similar mRNA vaccine developed by Moderna, which was authorized for emergency use in the United States on Friday, also contains the compound, polyethylene glycol (PEG) PEG has never been used before in an approved vaccine, but it is found in many drugs that have occasionally triggered anaphylaxis—a potentially life-threatening reaction that can cause rashes, a plummeting blood pressure, shortness of breath, and a fast heartbeat. Some allergists and immunologists believe a small number of people previously exposed to PEG may have high levels of antibodies against PEG, putting them at risk of an anaphylactic reaction to the vaccine.
Life-threatening responses seen in at least eight people could be linked to polyethylene glycol, known to trigger reactions to some drugs.