Lifeboat Foundation

When tuned up, old algorithms can match the abilities of their successors.

Since there is no treatment or vaccine for the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19 — the disease to which it leads — the only way to stop its spread is through social distancing and good hygiene. As such, long-term protective immunity could impact the overall course of the pandemic, the post-pandemic period and any subsequent waves. Until now, this concept has been a key component of the Health Ministry’s second wave strategy.

The Health Ministry recently revealed that it had purchased serological tests with the aim of surveying as many as 1 million people to determine how much of the public has been infected. Since around 80% of people who get the virus show little or no symptoms, they can carry and spread it without knowing.

However, “serology-based tests that measure previous infections for SARS‐CoV‐2 may have limited use if that infection has occurred more than one year prior to sampling,” the Amsterdam researchers explained.

NASA has estimated a 1-in-276 chance that the astronauts on the SpaceX rocket could die during the company’s first crewed mission.

Shrimp, lobsters and mushrooms may not seem like great tools for the battlefield, but three engineers from the University of Houston are using chitin—a derivative of glucose found in the cellular walls of arthropods and fungi—and 3D printing techniques to produce high-impact multilayered coatings that can protect soldiers against bullets, lasers, toxic gas and other dangers.

It turns out that to hear a person yapping, you need a protein called Yap. Working as part of what is known as the Yap/Tead complex, this important protein sends signals to the hearing organ to attain the correct size during embryonic development, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) from the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Neil Segil.

In addition, the mice developed interstitial pneumonia, which affects the tissue and space around the air sacs of the lungs, causing the infiltration of inflammatory cells, the thickening of the structure that separates air sacs, and blood vessel damage. Compared with young mice, older mice showed more severe lung damage and increased production of signaling molecules called cytokines. Taken together, these features recapitulate those observed in COVID-19 patients.

When the researchers administered SARS-CoV-2 into the stomach, two of the three mice showed high levels of viral RNA in the trachea and lung. The S protein was also present in lung tissue, which showed signs of inflammation. According to the authors, these findings are consistent with the observation that patients with COVID-19 sometimes experience gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea, abdominal pain, and vomiting. But 10 times the dose of SARS-CoV-2 was required to establish infection through the stomach than through the nose.

Future studies using this mouse model may shed light on how SARS-CoV-2 invades the brain and how the virus survives the gastrointestinal environment and invades the respiratory tract. “The hACE2 mice described in our manuscript provide a small animal model for understanding unexpected clinical manifestations of SARS-CoV-2 infection in humans,” concluded co-senior study author Chang-Fa Fan of NIFDC. “This model will also be valuable for testing vaccines and therapeutics to combat SARS-CoV-2.”

In August of 1953, a British-built Centurion tank drove through the brutal desert terrain of South Australia, its destination a parking spot a few hundred yards from an atomic bomb test. That was just the beginning of this tank’s amazing, and perhaps tragic, operational life.

Researchers have designed a new way to make concrete that would make frustrating cracks a thing of the past.

In the late 1990s, cosmologists made a prediction about how much ordinary matter there should be in the universe. About 5%, they estimated, should be regular stuff with the rest a mixture of dark matter and dark energy. But when cosmologists counted up everything they could see or measure at the time, they came up short. By a lot.