Lifeboat Foundation

Two documents dating back to 2015 shed further light on the role the federal government played in discovering remdesivir and its use in treating coronaviruses — work that has taken on new meaning as the Gilead Sciences (GILD) drug has gained global attention and an emergency use authorization from federal regulators to treat patients with Covid-19.

Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine.

The maker of a drug shown to shorten recovery time for severely ill COVID-19 patients says it will charge $2,340 for a typical treatment course for people covered by government health programs in the United States and other developed countries.

Gilead Sciences announced the price Monday for remdesivir, and said the price would be $3,120 for patients with private insurance. The amount that patients pay out of pocket depends on insurance, income and other factors.

“We’re in uncharted territory with pricing a new medicine, a novel medicine, in a pandemic,” Gilead’s chief executive, Dan O’Day, told The Associated Press.

This can make a huge difference in some parts.

Biohydrogel is more than just a water absorption and storage material that helps plants survive drought periods. It also functions as a soil conditioner that traps – and thereby reduces the loss of – agrochemicals like fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. This means Biohydrogel not only decreases agricultural costs but also helps prevent environmental pollution.

Continue reading “Biohydrogel: Saving irrigation water and protecting crops from droughts” »

For many comparatively simple ai applications, that means that the cost of training a computer is falling, says Christopher Manning, an associate director of the Institute for Human-Centered AI at the University of Stanford. But that is not true everywhere. A combination of ballooning complexity and competition means costs at the cutting edge are rising sharply.

Increased complexity and competition are part of it.

Technology Quarterly Jun 11th 2020 edition.

Continue reading “The cost of training machines is becoming a problem” »

He uses a code word for racist, because he is alt right.

Elon Musk said we need “some kind of mind viral immunity” to protect against the interconnected meme sphere.

Continue reading “Elon Musk says he sympathizes with ‘anti-globalization people’ because the online world is too interconnected and could lead to a ‘mind virus’” »

In a new study researchers at Karolinska Institutet and KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed a new kind of brain atlas based on an innovative method of mapping brain tissue into areas according to their molecular profile. The study is published in Science Advances.

High-powered microscope allows scientists to visualize an exotic structure called a superlattice.

In 1911, German mathematician Otto Toeplitz first posed the inscribed square problem, in which he predicted that “any closed curve contains four points that can be connected to form a square,” according to Quanta. For more than a century, it’s remained unsolved.

There’s quite a bit of buzz these days about how humanity could become a “multiplanetary” species. This is understandable, considering that space agencies and aerospace companies from around the world are planning on conducting missions to low earth orbit (LEO), the moon, and Mars in the coming years, not to mention establishing a permanent human presence there and beyond.

To do this, humanity needs to develop the necessary strategies for sustainable living in hostile environments and enclosed spaces. To prepare humans for this kind of experience, groups like Habitat Marte (Mars Habitat) and others are dedicated to conducting simulated missions in analog environments. The lessons learned will not only prepare people to live and work in space but foster ideas for sustainable living here on Earth.

Habitat Marte was founded in 2017 by Julio Francisco Dantas de Rezende, the professor of sustainability in the Department of Product Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) and the director of innovation with the Research Support Foundation (FAPERN). He is also the coordinator of Habitat Marte and Mars Society Brazil.