Lifeboat Foundation

The U.S. will pay Pfizer and biotech firm BioNTech $1.95 billion to produce and deliver 100 million doses of their Covid-19 vaccine if it proves safe and effective, the companies announced Wednesday.

It was the largest such deal between the government and companies racing to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

Under the agreement, the U.S. can acquire 500 million additional doses, the Department of Health and Human Services said. Germany-based BioNTech and Pfizer are jointly developing four potential vaccines.

Continue reading “U.S. agrees to pay Pfizer and BioNTech $2 billion for 100 million doses of coronavirus vaccine” »

An invention may turn one of the most widely used materials for biomedical applications into wearable devices to help monitor heart health.

A team from Purdue University developed self-powered wearable triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-based contact layers for monitoring cardiovascular health. TENGs help conserve mechanical energy and turn it into power.

The Purdue team’s work is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Kenya has stepped up efforts to find a local treatment for COVID-19. The Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), East Africa’s leading medical research facility, is testing the efficacy of an herbal medicine known as Zedupex.

The search for both a cure and a vaccine for the coronavirus has intensified around the globe, including in Kenya, as medical researchers race to find the elusive remedy.

Dr. Festus Tolo of Kenya’s Medical Research Institute is the lead scientist tasked with finding out whether an herbal-based drug will be effective against COVID-19. Zedupex, developed in 2015 by Kenyan researchers, has been used in the treatment of herpes.

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Among the drugs used for COVID-19 is a particularly promising Cuban compound called “Interferon alfa-2b,” which has been successfully administered to Chinese patients.

In Cuba, where precaution measures against COVID-19 have included the temporary closing of schools and the shutdown of the tourist sector, among others, authorities have called on people to stay at home while Cuban scientists are working hard to develop new biotech products to kill the lethal disease.

With a growing number of cases, the island’s healthcare infrastructure is ready to treat an expected surge of patients with a wide selection of promising drugs. “The package of drugs we are administering is based on the experience of countries hardest hit by the disease. We have considered this with our experts, while our scientists try to add new local drugs to this protocol,” said Cuban Health Minister Jose Angel Portal in a recent TV appearance.

Continue reading “Cuba’s Interferon alfa-2b works in treating COVID-19 in China” »

A blood test has been shown to detect five types of cancer years before the diseases could be spotted using conventional diagnostic methods, according to a study published Tuesday.

Developed by a Sino-US startup, the test found cancers in 91 percent of people who showed no symptoms when the blood sample was collected but were diagnosed one-to-four years later with stomach, esophageal, colon, lung or liver cancer, researchers reported in Nature Communications.

“The immediate focus is to test people at higher risk, based on family history, age or other known risk factors,” said co-author Kun Zhang, head of the bioengineering department at the University of California San Diego and an equity holder in Singlera Genomics, which developed the test.

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The core of GPT-3, which is a creation of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, is a general language model designed to perform autofill. It is trained on uncategorized internet writings, and basically guesses what text ought to come next from any starting point. That may sound unglamorous, but a language model built for guessing with 175 billion parameters — 10 times more than previous competitors — is surprisingly powerful.

With attention focused on a pandemic and an election, AI has taken a major leap forward.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence Is the Hope 2020 Needs” »

David Malan, of the hit class CS50, was working to perfect online teaching long before the pandemic. Is his method a model for the future of higher education?

Amazing.

The human DNA is a biological internet and superior in many aspects to the artificial one. Russian scientific research directly or indirectly explains phenomena such as clairvoyance, intuition, spontaneous and remote acts of healing, self healing, affirmation techniques, unusual light/auras around people (namely spiritual masters), mind’s influence on weather patterns and much more. In addition, there is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes.

Only 10% of our DNA is being used for building proteins. It is this subset of DNA that is of interest to western researchers and is being examined and categorized. The other 90% are considered “junk DNA.” The Russian researchers, however, convinced that nature was not dumb, joined linguists and geneticists in a venture to explore those 90% of “junk DNA.” Their results, findings and conclusions are simply revolutionary!

Continue reading “Scientists prove DNA can be reprogrammed by Words and Frequencies” »

This study attempts to answer the question: “Is hearing the last to go?” We present evidence of hearing among unresponsive actively dying hospice patients. Individual ERP (MMN, P3a, and P3b) responses to deviations in auditory patterns are reported for conscious young, healthy control participants, as well as for hospice patients, both when the latter were conscious, and again when they became unresponsive to their environment. Whereas the MMN (and perhaps too the P3a) is considered an automatic response to auditory irregularities, the P3b is associated with conscious detection of oddball targets. All control participants, and most responsive hospice patients, evidenced a “local” effect (either a MMN, a P3a, or both) and some a “global” effect (P3b) to deviations in tone, or deviations in auditory pattern. Importantly, most unresponsive patients showed evidence of MMN responses to tone changes, and some showed a P3a or P3b response to either tone or pattern changes. Thus, their auditory systems were responding similarly to those of young, healthy controls just hours from end of life. Hearing may indeed be one of the last senses to lose function as humans die.