About 50 years ago, scientists believed magic mushrooms and LSD held a lot of medicinal promise. So then, how did they become such a taboo to even discuss? Government officials thought that if young men were on LSD, they wouldn’t want to fight in wars.
In this video, author Michael Pollan describes the little known history of psychedelic drugs in America.
Circa 2018
It may look like just another giant smokestack, but a 200-foot tower in the central Chinese city of Xi’an was built to pull deadly pollutants from the air rather than add more. And preliminary research shows the tower — which some are calling the world’s largest air purifier — has cut air pollution significantly across a broad swath of the surrounding area.
Given those findings, the researchers behind the project say they hope to build an even taller air-purifying tower in Xi’an, and possibly in other cities around China.
“I like to tell my students that we don’t need to be medical doctors to save lives,” said Dr. David Pui, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota and one of the researchers. “If we can just reduce the air pollution in major metropolitan areas by 20 percent, for example, we can save tens of thousands of lives each year.”
Circa 2016 could cure viruses in no time.
When you get right down to it, developing vaccines is about data and luck. Scientists start with a set of variables—what drugs a virus responds to, how effectively, and for whom—and then it’s a whole lot of trial and error until they stumble upon a cure.
One of the most exciting possibilities in medical research right now is how technology like machine learning could help researchers rapidly process those enormous sets of data, more quickly leading to cures. This is already starting to happen: In a study published Wednesday in the journal Macromolecules, researchers from IBM and Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology reveal a breakthrough that could help prevent deadly virus infections. With the help of IBM super computer Watson, they hope their finding will soon make its way into vaccines.
Scientists say lab-grown virus is ‘game changer’ in fight against illness.
Circa 2016
Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced an ambitious project—to “invest in basic science research with the goal of curing disease.” The couple started by donating $3 billion over 10 years in this initiative, which target four major groups of illnesses: cancer, infectious diseases, as well as heart and neurological diseases.
Chinas-coronavirus-hospital-OPENS-today.
China’s first coronavirus hospital has opened in a city near Wuhan after workers and volunteers spent just two days converting an empty building to a 1,000-bed emergency facility.
The first batch of coronavirus patients were transferred to the Dabie Mountain Regional Medical Centre in Huanggang at around 10:30pm local time Tuesday.
The extra capacity will be welcomed by overwhelmed medical staff in Hubei, the locked-down province at the centre of the crisis.