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Feb 16, 2023

How quickly does COVID immunity fade? What scientists know

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Three years into the pandemic, the immune systems of the vast majority of humans have learnt to recognize SARS-CoV-2 through vaccination, infection or, in many cases, both. But just how quickly do these types of immunity fade?

New evidence suggests that ‘hybrid’ immunity, the result of both vaccination and a bout of COVID-19, can provide partial protection against reinfection for at least eight months1. It also offers greater than 95% protection against severe disease or hospitalization for between six months and a year after an infection or vaccination, according to estimates from a meta-analysis2. Immunity acquired by booster vaccination alone seems to fade somewhat faster.

But the durability of immunity is much more complex than the numbers suggest. How long the immune system can fend off SARS-CoV-2 infection depends not only on how much immunity wanes over time but also on how well immune cells recognize their target. “And that has more to do with the virus and how much it mutates,” says Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson. If a new variant finds ways to escape the existing immune response, then even a recent infection might not guarantee protection.

Feb 16, 2023

Listeria Outbreak with Unknown Food Source

Posted by in category: food

Get the most up-to-date outbreak information here.

Feb 16, 2023

Moxi the Robot — Texas Health Resources

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, robotics/AI

As technology will progress robots will become cheaper.in future healthcare robots can be available at v less cost.then we can gift these robots to our bedridden friends and relatives.


A nurse-assisting robot named Moxi has been working with clinical staff on the neurology unit at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas. During the month-long trial, Moxi helped with fetch-and-gather tasks such as delivering admissions kits, lab specimens and picking up and dropping off linen bags. Texas Health Dallas is the first hospital in the country to deploy Moxi. The robot was designed to provide clinical staff more time to focus on patient care.

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Feb 16, 2023

Einstein’s 107-year-old Theory on Gravitational Waves Is True; What Are These Forces of the Universe?

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

The discovery of gravitational waves (GWs) in the system has shown that this prediction made by Einstein 107 years ago is true. The findings also resulted in a revolution in the world of astronomy.

What Are Gravitational Waves?

Continue reading “Einstein’s 107-year-old Theory on Gravitational Waves Is True; What Are These Forces of the Universe?” »

Feb 16, 2023

Hijacking our cells’ enzymes to eliminate disease-causing proteins

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Their findings, published in a Cell Reports paper titled “Palmitoylation and PDE6δ regulate membrane-compartment-specific substrate ubiquitylation and degradation,” have implications for developing new therapies.

Lead author Shafi Kuchay, assistant professor of biochemistry and in the College of Medicine and member of the University of Illinois Cancer Center at UIC, said that most common drugs work by targeting proteins that are located at the membranes of cells. Many of these proteins can cause diseases by being overly active. Unfortunately, most currently available drugs just block the activity of the harmful proteins, and while they are helpful in the short term, resistance to the drugs can develop over time.

Feb 16, 2023

A large language model that answers philosophical questions

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

In recent years, computer scientists have been trying to create increasingly advanced dialogue and information systems. The release of ChatGPT and other highly performing language models are demonstrating just how far artificial intelligence can go in answering user questions, writing texts and conversing with humans.

Researchers at University of California-Riverside, École Normale Supérieure (ECN) in Paris, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München developed a large language model that can answer philosophical questions in the voice of a specific philosopher. This model, presented in a paper published on the pre-print server arXiv, can autonomously generate answers that closely resemble those produced by human philosophers.

“Anna Strasser, Matthew Crosby and I had noticed that people were creating GPT-3 outputs in the style of various writers or other philosophers,” Eric Schwitzgebel, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “We thought it would be interesting to see if we could fine-tune GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) on the body of work of a philosopher, then ask it questions and see if it said things that the real philosopher might have said.”

Feb 16, 2023

Sundar Pichai tells Google employees to spend 4 hours with Bard to make it a worthy ChatGPT opponent

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, robotics/AI

Google was referring to its dominant position in the search market. In the early 2000s, several search engines existed in the market, but Google now has 90 per cent of the market. It is also not the pioneer of Android, though it purchased it at an early stage. At that time, the market was dominated by Blackberry and Nokia custom OS (operating systems), but today, Android has the largest mobile OS market share.

In the email, Pichai reportedly remained optimistic and said that AI has “gone through many winters and springs”, adding that the “most important thing we can do right now is to focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly.”

Continue reading “Sundar Pichai tells Google employees to spend 4 hours with Bard to make it a worthy ChatGPT opponent” »

Feb 16, 2023

Reconfigurable Antenna Merges Mechanical Engineering and Electromagnetics for Next-Generation Technology

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, engineering, internet

Reconfigurable antennas — those that can tune properties like frequency or radiation beams in real-time, from afar — are integral to future communication network systems, like 6G. But many current reconfigurable antenna designs can fall short: they dysfunction in high or low temperatures, have power limitations, or require regular servicing.

To address these limitations, electrical engineers in the Penn State College of Engineering combined electromagnets with a compliant mechanism, which is the same mechanical engineering concept behind binder clips or a bow and arrow. They published their proof-of-concept reconfigurable compliant mechanism-enabled patch antenna today (February 13, 2023) in the journal Nature Communications.

<em>Nature Communications</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access, multidisciplinary, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio. It covers the natural sciences, including physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and earth sciences. It began publishing in 2010 and has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.

Feb 16, 2023

Grid of atoms is both a quantum computer and an optimization solver

Posted by in categories: computing, information science, mathematics, particle physics, quantum physics

Quantum computing has entered a bit of an awkward period. There have been clear demonstrations that we can successfully run quantum algorithms, but the qubit counts and error rates of existing hardware mean that we can’t solve any commercially useful problems at the moment. So, while many companies are interested in quantum computing and have developed software for existing hardware (and have paid for access to that hardware), the efforts have been focused on preparation. They want the expertise and capability needed to develop useful software once the computers are ready to run it.

For the moment, that leaves them waiting for hardware companies to produce sufficiently robust machines—machines that don’t currently have a clear delivery date. It could be years; it could be decades. Beyond learning how to develop quantum computing software, there’s nothing obvious to do with the hardware in the meantime.

But a company called QuEra may have found a way to do something that’s not as obvious. The technology it is developing could ultimately provide a route to quantum computing. But until then, it’s possible to solve a class of mathematical problems on the same hardware, and any improvements to that hardware will benefit both types of computation. And in a new paper, the company’s researchers have expanded the types of computations that can be run on their machine.

Feb 16, 2023

Black holes are the source of dark energy that is causing expansion of the universe, study says

Posted by in category: cosmology

Black holes are the source of dark energy, the mysterious force behind the accelerating expansion of the universe, says a new study. This claim comes from an international team that compared growth rates of black holes in different galaxies. The team concluded that the spread of the masses observed could be explained by black holes bearing cores of ‘dark energy’, a report by the Guardian said.

Seventeen researchers in nine countries shared their findings in two papers published in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters. One of the researchers, Duncan Farrah from the University of Hawaii, said, “We propose that black holes are the source for dark energy.” Farrah added that this dark energy is produced when the normal matter is compressed during the death and collapse of large stars, the Guardian report added.

The researchers said the findings could be explained if black holes grow as the universe expands. They said that observations found black holes expanding 10 orders of magnitude in mass across most of cosmic history.