Lifeboat Foundation

HOUSTON, May 1, 2020 — Rice University researchers plan to reconfigure their wastewater-treatment technology to capture and deactivate the virus that causes COVID-19. Their chemical-free nanotechnology, introduced earlier this year as a way to kill bacterial “superbugs” and degrade their antibiotic resistance genes in wastewater, will use graphitic carbon nitride to selectively adsorb viruses and then disable them by activating nearby catalysts with light. The team believes that this photocatalytic approach to disinfection — what it calls the “trap-and-zap” treatment approach — could be used to recognize coronaviruses that cause not only COVID-19 but also MERS and SARS.

An injectable antibiotic developed by a team at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem could have a deep impact not only on treating COVID-19 patients, but also on all those affected by antibiotic-resistant infections.

Prof. Yechezkel Barenholz and Dr. Ahuva Cern with their team at the Laboratory of Membrane and Liposome Research at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem have been working on improving the performance of drugs in treating different illnesses, including cancer and infectious diseases, for many years. Their method is based on encapsulating the drugs in particles that can be injected into the body.

“We take well-known and established drugs and encapsulate them in two types of particles, called ‘liposomes’ because they are made of lipids, meaning fats,” Barenholz told The Jerusalem Post. “These particles imitate the human cell because they feature a membrane separating the outer world and the inner world of the unit.”

Continue reading “Israeli team finds way to inject drug against COVID-19-related infections” »

The debate is focused on a subset of gain-of-function studies that manipulate deadly viruses to increase their transmissibility or virulence. “This is what happens to viruses in the wild”, explains Carrie Wolinetz, head of the NIH Office of Science Policy. “Gain-of-function experiments allow us to understand how pandemic viruses evolve, so that we can make predictions, develop countermeasures, and do disease surveillance”. Although none of the widely publicised mishaps of 2014 involved such work, the NIH decided to suspend funding for gain-of-function studies involving influenza, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV.

The US moratorium on gain-of-function experiments has been rescinded, but scientists are split over the benefits—and risks—of such studies. Talha Burki reports.

On Dec 19, 2017, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that they would resume funding gain-of-function experiments involving influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus. A moratorium had been in place since October, 2014. At the time, the NIH had stated that the moratorium “will be effective until a robust and broad deliberative process is completed that results in the adoption of a new US Government gain-of-function research policy”. This process has now concluded. It was spearheaded by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) and led to the development of a new framework for assessing funding decisions for research involving pathogens with enhanced pandemic potential. The release of the framework by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), of which NIH is part, signalled the end of the funding pause.

Continue reading “Ban on gain-of-function studies ends” »

Circa 2015

Half the world is facing water shortages, so is it time for us all to start drinking recycled sewage?

Many people in the Northwest separate out their table scraps, wilted leaves and old fruit, carting them off eventually to a compost bin or joining their grass clippings and pruning remains in the green waste bin. In the City of Seattle, food waste is required to be separated from garbage.

But most of our actions still revolve around a simple concept: Collect your household waste, sit it on the curb, and somebody will come and pick it up. Businesses do the same thing, just on a larger scale. We have applied industrial-age logic to waste: create a production line that starts at a home or business, automate as many of the tasks as possible, and coordinate through centrally managed processes and destinations.

This centralized approach to waste collection is labor and energy intensive, and it doesn’t give back much.

May the Fourth be with you! Here’s Bionic Bella chatting to LUKE SKYWALKER about her new R2-D2 bionic arm! ✨ 🤩 www.openbionics.com/bella #StarWarsDay

CursedChrome shows how hackers can take full control over your Chrome browser using just one extension.

The triumph of Google’s AlphaGo in 2016 against Go world champion Lee Sedol by 4:1 caused quite the stir that reached far beyond the Go community, with over a hundred million people watching while the match was taking place. It was a milestone in the development of AI: Go had withstood the attempts of computer scientists to build algorithms that could play at a human level for a long time. And now an artificial mind had been built, dominating someone that had dedicated thousands of hours of practice to hone his craft with relative ease.

This was already quite the achievement, but then AlphaGoZero came along, and fed AlphaGo some of its own medicine: it won against AlphaGo with a margin of 100:0 only a year after Lee Sedol’s defeat. This was even more spectacular, and for more than the obvious reasons. AlphaGoZero was not only an improved version of AlphaGo. Where AlphaGo had trained with the help of expert games played by the best human Go players, AlphaGoZero had started literally from zero, working the intricacies of the game out without any supervision.

Continue reading “AlphaZero and the Beauty of the Artificial Mind” »

#Circa2018

The world’s largest meat processing company begins experimenting with machine learning in their plants. Developing and implementing these smart machines, capable of performing skilled and dexterous tasks, is pushing the current boundaries of automation.

JBS is the world’s largest meat processing company. With revenues of over $51 billion, it operates over 300 production units worldwide specializing in the processing of pork, beef, poultry, and lamb [1]. As meat and protein remain a mostly commoditized industry, JBS continually strives to maximize efficiency in all aspects of the value chain. To increase its processing efficiencies and worker safety, JBS bought a controlling share of New Zealand based Scott Technology, an automation and robotics company in late 2015 [2]. This move accelerated the implementation of machine learning in meat processing plants.