Lifeboat Foundation

Ladies Monday with ReallyGraceful.

Editors Note: While we have all been preoccupied with the relevant story of the day, ReallyGraceful has covered a couple of items that you may have missed over the past couple of weeks.

Continue reading “While You Watched The Shiney Things” »

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.

Hmm… are people with reduced lung capacity after recovering from the coronavirus more susceptible to getting the flu? Or does taking antibiotics increase one’s risk getting the coronavirus since it attacks the respiratory system?

Antibiotics can leave the lung vulnerable to flu viruses, leading to significantly worse infections and symptoms, finds a new study in mice led by the Francis Crick Institute.

The research, published in Cell Reports, discovered that signals from gut bacteria help to maintain a first line of defence in the lining of the lung. When mice with healthy gut bacteria were infected with the flu, around 80% of them survived. However, only a third survived if they were given antibiotics before being infected.

“We found that antibiotics can wipe out early flu resistance, adding further evidence that they should not be taken or prescribed lightly,” explains Dr Andreas Wack, who led the research at the Francis Crick Institute. “Inappropriate use not only promotes antibiotic resistance and kills helpful gut bacteria, but may also leave us more vulnerable to viruses. This could be relevant not only in humans but also livestock animals, as many farms around the world use antibiotics prophylactically. Further research in these environments is urgently needed to see whether this makes them more susceptible to viral infections.”

On Thursday, March 18, Austin-based Everlywell announced that it will begin selling home tests for COVID-19 beginning Monday, March 23. The business already offers dozens of at-home testing kits for anything from cholesterol levels to fertility to food sensitivities, but it is the first U.S. company to announce an at-home COVID-19 test. Everlywell has an initial supply of 30,000 COVID-19 tests and is working with multiple laboratories to scale that number to 250,000 tests weekly.

The test can be requested online for people experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. To access a test, consumers can go to everlywell.com and complete a screening questionnaire. According to the website, the test is shipped to customers with everything needed to collect a sample at home and safely ship that sample to a CLIA-certified lab partner. (All of Everywell’s laboratory partners conducting COVID-19 testing are complying with the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for COVID-19 symptoms.) The samples will then be shipped to partner labs overnight, and secure digital results will be available online within 48 hours of the lab receiving the sample. Free telehealth consultations with an independent, board-certified physician will also be available to those with positive results. The test is $135, at no profit to Everlywell, and is covered by participating HSA and FSA providers. The brand has reached out to government officials to see if the test can be made available for free.

Looking for patient 1; Mr. Chen :

On Jan. 24, the Lancet, an independent medical journal, published a study showing Wuhan’s first patient was not connected to the seafood market. A joint research team representing China’s Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Huanan Agricultural College and the Chinese Institute for Brain Research have also said the seafood market is not the source of COVID-19.

https://www.upi.com/…/Reports-Chinas-first-C…/1201582811760/

Continue reading “Reports: China’s first COVID-19 patient not linked to seafood market” »

Australian supermarket giant Woolworths is introducing a dedicated shopping hour that will only allow elderly and disabled people to purchase items.

Starting tomorrow (March 17) shopping between 7 am and 8 am will be exclusive to elderly and disabled people with government-issued disability and pension cards.

These actions are a direct response to the chaotic panic buying and hoarding of essential items by other greedy shoppers which has left older people struggling to get their hands on food and toiletries.

Permanent magnets akin to those used on refrigerators could speed the development of fusion energy – the same energy produced by the sun and stars.

In principle, such magnets can greatly simplify the design and production of twisty fusion facilities called stellarators, according to scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. PPPL founder Lyman Spitzer Jr. invented the stellarator in the early 1950s.

Most stellarators use a set of complex twisted coils that spiral like stripes on a candy cane to produce magnetic fields that shape and control the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. Refrigerator-like permanent magnets could produce the hard part of these essential fields, the researchers say, allowing simple, non-twisted coils to produce the remaining part in place of the complex coils.

Whole Foods could afford to offer employees unlimited paid sick time during the Coronavirus outbreak. Instead, they have suggested that employees donate their accumulated paid time off to their coworkers.

Population Research Institute President Steven W. Mosher wrote at the New York Post on Saturday that China’s coronavirus epidemic could have been unleashed by researchers who sold laboratory animals to the notorious “wet markets” of Wuhan for extra cash.

Mosher is not the first skeptic of Beijing’s official coronavirus narrative to note the presence of an advanced microbiology lab near Wuhan, the city where the epidemic originated. Since the early days of the crisis, theories have suggested everything from the lab accidentally releasing the virus to speculation that the virus might have been deliberately designed as a biological weapon.

His theory cited as evidence the release of new guidelines from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology calling for “strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”