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.
The Pacific Ocean is becoming more acidic, and the cash-crabs that live in its coastal waters are some of its first inhabitants to feel its effects.
The Dungeness crab is vital to commercial fisheries in the Pacific Northwest, but lower pH levels in its habitat are dissolving parts of its shell and damaging its sensory organs, a new study found.
Their injuries could impact coastal economies and forebode the obstacles in a changing sea. And while the results aren’t unexpected, the study’s authors said the damage to the crabs is premature: The acidity wasn’t predicted to damage the crabs this quickly.
Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is one of the most common and most devastating muscular diseases, greatly reducing patients’ quality of life and life expectancy. Now, researchers in Germany have managed to use the CRISPR gene-editing tool to correct the condition in pigs, bringing the treatment ever closer to human trials.
A protein called dystrophin is necessary for muscles to regenerate themselves, but people with DMD have a genetic mutation that removes the gene that produces dystrophin. That means that affected children usually begin to show symptoms of muscle weakness by age five, lose the ability to walk by about age 12, and rarely live through their 30s as their heart muscles give out.
Because it’s a genetic condition, DMD is a prime target for treatment with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. This system is prized for its ability to cut out problematic genes and replace them with more beneficial ones, and has been put to work treating cancer, HIV and forms of blindness.