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May 3, 2020

Virus vaccine ‘could be ready by end of the year’

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

AstraZeneca will make and distribute Oxford University’s coronavirus vaccine if it proves effective.

May 3, 2020

Chinese firm ‘ready to mass produce’ experimental coronavirus vaccine

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

A Chinese pharmaceutical company carrying out human trials for a coronavirus vaccine says it’s ready to start producing its product on a mass scale.

May 3, 2020

DARPA Is Creating a Travel Adapter That Will Be Implanted in Soldiers’ Bodies

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, food, military

‘Through advances in medical devices and synthetic biology, DARPA’s new Advanced Acclimation and Protection Tool for Environmental Readiness (ADAPTER) program aims to develop a travel adapter for the human body, an implantable or ingestible bioelectronic carrier that can provide warfighters control over their own physiology. The integrated system will be designed to entrain the sleep cycle – either to a new time zone or back to a normal sleep pattern after night missions – and eliminate bacteria that cause traveler’s diarrhea after ingestion of contaminated food and water,’ reads a DARPA statement on the new device.”


The adapter is meant to regulate sleep patterns and protect against diarrhea.

May 3, 2020

That Unusually Large Ozone Hole Over The Arctic Has Closed Up Again

Posted by in categories: climatology, surveillance

Earlier this year, the layer of ozone over the Arctic thinned out enough to be considered a serious sized hole. It wasn’t exactly impressive compared with its southern cousin, but it was certainly a lot bigger than we’d ever seen it before.

Now, according to surveillance by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), we can breathe a sigh of relief. It’s healed up again.

That’s great news for ecosystems below, which rely on concentrations of ozone gas high up in the stratosphere to act as a planetary-scale sunscreen against damaging showers of UV radiation.

May 3, 2020

Picotechnology in the center of new research partnership

Posted by in category: nanotechnology

North­eastern Uni­ver­sity and Wen­zhou Med­ical Uni­ver­sity in China have part­nered to com­bine their exper­tise in nan­otech­nology and med­i­cine, respec­tively, to col­lab­o­rate on research focusing on reducing eye infections caused by contact lenses and intraocular devices.

Through this part­ner­ship, the researchers will explore the emerging field of picotech­nology, which involves the manip­u­la­tion of matter on an even smaller scale than is used in nanotechnology.


Nanotechnology researchers at Northeastern are joining forces with Wenzhou Medical University in China to collaborate in the new field of picotechnology—and combat eye infections.

Continue reading “Picotechnology in the center of new research partnership” »

May 3, 2020

There’s Plenty More Room at the Bottom: Beyond Nanotech to Femtotech

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, engineering, nanotechnology


Not long ago nanotechnology was a fringe topic; now it’s a flourishing engineering field, and fairly mainstream. For example, while writing this article, I happened to receive an email advertisement for the “Second World Conference on Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery,” in Kerala, India. It wasn’t so long ago that nanomedicine seemed merely a flicker in the eyes of Robert Freitas and a few other visionaries!

But nano is not as small as the world goes. A nanometer is 10−9 meters – the scale of atoms and molecules. A water molecule is a bit less than one nanometer long, and a germ is around a thousand nanometers across. On the other hand, a proton has a diameter of a couple femtometers – where a femtometer, at 10−15 meters, makes a nanometer seem positively gargantuan. Now that the viability of nanotech is widely accepted (in spite of some ongoing heated debates about the details), it’s time to ask: what about femtotech? Picotech or other technologies at the scales between nano and femto seem relatively uninteresting, because we don’t know any basic constituents of matter that exist at those scales. But femtotech, based on engineering structures from subatomic particles, makes perfect conceptual sense, though it’s certainly difficult given current technology.

The nanotech field was arguably launched by Richard Feynman’s 1959 talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” As Feynman wrote there.

May 3, 2020

2020 LiveWire Commercial | Harley-Davidson

Posted by in category: futurism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGOsyM_Kifk&feature=youtu.be

Let mind and body get swept up in pure riding pleasure.

More on the 2020 LiveWire ➡️ http://bit.ly/2020HDLiveWire

Continue reading “2020 LiveWire Commercial | Harley-Davidson” »

May 3, 2020

NASA’s Doug Hurley Will Make History in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon

Posted by in category: space travel

Hurley is one of two astronauts who will be aboard the Crew Dragon for its first manned test flight this month. He spoke to Digital Trends about the experience.

May 3, 2020

13 seconds, 67 shots, 4 dead: 50 years ago, the Kent State shootings changed the country

Posted by in category: futurism

The shootings at the Vietnam War protest was seen “as an indication that things in the U.S. — on and off campus — were spiraling out of control,” a historian said.

National Guardsmen fire a barrage of tear gas into a crowd of demonstrators on the campus of Kent State University on May 4, 1970. Bettmann Archive.

May 3, 2020

Pompeo: ‘Enormous Evidence’ Links Virus to China Lab

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said “enormous evidence” shows the novel coronavirus outbreak began in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, but didn’t provide any proof for his claims.

“I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan,” Pompeo said on ABC’s “This Week.” “These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”

Pompeo stopped short of saying the virus was man-made, noting that he agreed with a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that ruled out genetic modification or it having been man-made.