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With his Regeneron treatment, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott joined a list of high-profile conservatives, including Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani and former President Donald Trump, who have relied on the therapy. But some scientists have been critical of the push for antibody treatments over other, easier prevention methods.

(polite notice: Regeneron helped end the ebola epidemic, by ending clinical trials early, and getting treatments to people ASAP)

When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Tuesday that had tested postiive for Covid-19, his office shared that he was treated with a therapy not yet approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, but one of the few shown to be effective against the virus: monoclonal antibodies.

Monoclonal antibodies such as those made by Regeneron and GlaxoSmithKline won’t work for every Covid-19 patient; mAbs, as they are known, are only available for people age 12 and older and who aren’t hospitalized or severely ill.

Continue reading “Covid-19 antibody treatments work, but they’re ‘not the path out of this pandemic’” | >

A British study found that protection from either of the two most commonly used COVID-19 vaccines against the Delta variant weakens within three months. It also found that those who get infected after receiving two shots of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or the AstraZeneca vaccine may be of greater risk to others than under previous variants of the coronavirus Based on more than three million nose and throat swabs taken across Britain, the Oxford University study found that 90 days after a second shot of the Pfizer or Astrazeneca vaccine, their efficacy in preventing infections had slipped to 75% and 61% respectively.

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Researchers are studying adding carbon capture technologies to vehicles so that the CO2 can be sequestered or recycled into renewable hydrocarbon fuels.

According to senior researcher of the study; “This technology really doesn’t have any major hurdles to making it work,”

When people talk about how to eliminate vehicles’ carbon dioxide (CO2) emission, often the conversation often focuses on electrifying cars, trucks and buses. Yet cargo and tanker ships, which are responsible for 3% of all CO2 emissions, are rarely a part of the discussion.

Now a Northwestern University research team offers a practical way to make ships CO2 neutral—or even CO2 negative—with CO2-capturing solid oxide fuel cells. After “burning” traditional carbon-based fuels, the fuel cell generates concentrated CO2 that can be stored on-board the ship. From there, the CO2 can either be sequestered or recycled into a renewable hydrocarbon fuel.

Continue reading “The case for onboard carbon dioxide capture on long-range vehicles” | >

Over the last few decades, various forms of solar power stations have been proposed from around the world but they remained theoretical because of major technical challenges.

At Bishan, Chinese researchers would first need to prove that wireless power transfer worked over a long distance.

Civilian and military researchers will look at applications for the technology amid concerns about radiation and the potential for beams misfired from space.

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NASA has confirmed that SpaceX’s next Falcon 9 launch is now scheduled to occur no earlier than 3:37 am EDT (07:37 UTC) on Saturday, August 28th.

Known as CRS-23, the cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is noteworthy for two major reasons. Most importantly, CRS-23 will mark SpaceX’s first-ever reuse of an upgraded Cargo Dragon 2 spacecraft. Simultaneously, that reuse milestone will coincide with another when SpaceX smashes its internal record for orbital spacecraft turnaround later this month.

Second, much to the surprise of virtually everyone watching from the sidelines, SpaceX’s last launch occurred on June 30th – in the first half of 2021. One step removed from the mission’s technical specifics, CRS-23 will, in other words, also be SpaceX’s first launch in almost two months – a gap not seen in two years.

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have explored high-pressure behavior of shock-compressed tantalum at the Omega Laser Facility at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). The work showed tantalum did not follow the predicted phase changes at high pressure and instead maintained the body-centered cubic (BCC) phase until melt.

The results of the work are featured in a Physical Review Letters paper and focuses on how researchers studied the melting behavior of at multi-megabar pressures on the nanosecond timescale.

“This work provides an improved physical intuition for how materials melt and respond at such extreme conditions,” said Rick Kraus, lead author of the paper. “These techniques and improved knowledge base are now being applied to understanding how the iron cores of rocky planets solidify and also to more programmatically relevant materials as well.”

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