Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,264

Coronavirus Pandemic: A Call to Action for the Robotics Community

Medical robotics expert Guang-Zhong Yang calls for a global effort to develop new types of robots for fighting infectious diseases.

When I reached Professor Guang-Zhong Yang on the phone last week, he was cooped up in a hotel room in Shanghai, where he had self-isolated after returning from a trip abroad. I wanted to hear from Yang, a widely respected figure in the robotics community, about the role that robots are playing in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. He’d been monitoring the situation from his room over the previous week, and during that time his only visitors were a hotel employee, who took his temperature twice a day, and a small wheeled robot, which delivered his meals autonomously.

An IEEE Fellow and founding editor of the journal Science Robotics, Yang is the former director and co-founder of the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery at Imperial College London. More recently, he became the founding dean of the Institute of Medical Robotics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, often called the MIT of China. Yang wants to build the new institute into a robotics powerhouse, recruiting 500 faculty members and graduate students over the next three years to explore areas like surgical and rehabilitation robots, image-guided systems, and precision mechatronics.

“I ran a lot of the operations for the institute from my hotel room using Zoom,” he told me.

Augmenting Your Immunity: Fighting COVID-19

#Interesting opinion from a #Futurist

Why do the young survive, and older individuals fall ill?

Likely because our immune systems degrade as we age. It’s the same reason that humans see increased cancer rates as we age— as we grow older, our immune systems, which normally find and destroy cancers in our bodies, become overwhelmed, exhausted, depleted.

As researchers are racing to develop vaccines and antiviral therapies to treat the COVID-19 pandemic, one promising option is immunotherapy. This technology uses components of our immune system to alter or boost a patient’s immune response. Immunotherapy has been used successfully to treat other viral diseases as well as cancer and diseases of the immune system.

DARPA is Building a Robotic Space Mechanic to Fix Satellites in Orbit

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that’s responsible for developing emerging technologies for the U.S. military, is building a new high-tech spacecraft — and it’s armed. In an age of Space Force and burgeoning threats like hunter-killer satellites, this might not sound too surprising. But you’re misunderstanding. DARPA’s new spacecraft, currently “in the thick of it” when it comes to development, is armed. As in, it has arms. Like the ones you use for grabbing things.

Armed robots aren’t new. Mechanical robot arms are increasingly widespread here on Earth. Robot arms have been used to carry out complex surgery and flip burgers. Attached to undersea exploration vehicles, they’ve been used to probe submerged wrecks. They’ve been used to open doors, defuse bombs, and decommission nuclear power plants. They’re pretty darn versatile. But space is another matter entirely.

FDA Approves First Bedside Covid-19 Test

A Covid-19 test can deliver results in less than an hour has been approved under an FDA emergency authorization, marking the first test that clinicians can use at the bedside.

Testing shortages have been an ongoing challenge in the U.S. response to curb the pandemic. The White House has promised testing will ramp up as more private companies come on board.

Public health and clinical labs have run more than 195,000 tests to date, but that doesn’t include hospital laboratories running their own test, Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said during a White House briefing Saturday.

Coronavirus claims 651 lives in 24 hours in Italy

The coronavirus death toll in Italy’s worst-hit region has surpassed 3,450 in the last 24 hours after a rise of 360 fatalities in Lombardy.

Ministers in Rome have been forced to plunge all 60million citizens into lockdown, while ordering all non-essential businesses in the country to shut amid the Covid-19 outbreak.

The pandemic has taken a choke-hold on everyday life, with even Pope Francis retreating indoors to make his weekly address via videolink.

Star Trek’s William Shatner Celebrates His 89th Birthday

He is a life extension proponent. Most recently he had stem cell treatments.

https://r.search.aol.com/…/…/RS=z6jNC56Uy1xYc8k56jUUir9YRk0

William Shatner, who played the iconic Captain James Tiberius Kirk in Star Trek: The Original Series and seven Star Trek films, turns 89 years young today.

Born on March 22, 1931 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, William Shatner began his career as a Shakespearean stage performer in Stratford, Canada and on Broadway in New York City in the early 1950’s. Though his first appearance in cinema was that of a minor role in the 1951 Canadian film The Butler’s Night Off, Shatner’s prominence in film did not arrive until his second debut in 1958 as Alexey Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, a film adaptation of one of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s literary works. During that time, he played a major role as Jim Whitely in The Glass Eye, an episode form the third season of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In 1959, William Shatner performed on stage in Broadway once again as Lomax in The World of Suzie Wong; his outstanding performance was received very well by critics, which earned him greater repute in the theatrical and film community.

PG&E Donates 1M Masks to Hospitals, First Responders

PG&E is donating nearly 1 million protective masks from the supply it keeps on hand for crews responding to fires and construction zones, to distribute to California hospitals and first responders, company officials said Friday.

The 480,000 N95 masks and 470,000 surgical masks will go to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, for hospitals and those on the front lines facing a critical shortage of protective equipment.

The company maintains a supply of masks for utility crews working in construction zones or responding to wildfires, Andy Vesey, PG&E CEO and president said.

/* */