Lifeboat Foundation

We are being told that mistakes can not happen in labs. I for one do not believe such, so let me take you on a trip down memory lane to 2014, around the same year funding of gain of function was stopped.

Lab workers at different sites accidentally jabbed themselves with needles contaminated by anthrax or West Nile virus. An air-cleaning system meant to filter dangerous microbes out of a lab failed, but no one knew because the alarms had been turned off. A batch of West Nile virus, improperly packed in dry ice, burst open at a Federal Express shipping center. Mice infected with bubonic plague or Q fever went missing. And workers exposed to Q fever, brucellosis or tuberculosis did not realize it until they either became ill or blood tests detected the exposure.

The recent number of mistakes documented at federal laboratories involving anthrax, flu and smallpox viruses have contributed to a debate over lax government oversight at high-level containment labs.

Continue reading “Pathogen Mishaps Rise as Regulators Stay Clear” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=h5jBjso6l6I

Circa 2015

Fittingly, these rifle-sized weapons would gun for other electronics.

Continue reading “The Army Is Testing Handheld Ray Guns” »

The company’s crewed mission, set for later this month, will help support missions to Mars.

Murphy’s Law: Everything that can go wrong will in fact go wrong.

Here is how to set the table for Murphy’s Law and become the epic center in the world for the COVID-19:

A. Eliminate the entire global health security team at the White House. Their job? Managing pandemics like COVID-19.

Continue reading “France’s first Covid-19 case ‘dates back to December’, flu retest shows” »

Beijing’s desire to turn the South China Sea into a personal lake for President Xi Jinping is getting pushback from an unexpected source, the United State Marine Corps. When people think of the Marines, they generally think of assault troops and aggressive attacks on fortified positions, so sea control might seem a stretch for the Corps.

But Marines are adaptive. Actually, the Marines are going back to the future. The seizure and defense of advanced naval bases has been a major part of the Marine Corps’ mission for over a century; but since World War II, the seizure portion — better known as amphibious warfare — has overshadowed the defensive mission. The Marine Corps commandant, Gen. David Berger, is rebalancing the Marine Corps for a closer integration with the Navy after the two sea services had drifted apart for several decades.

To understand this, we need to understand the threat posed by Chinese build-up in the Indo-Pacific Region.

The ESA’s fifth call for medium-class missions (M5) is in its full study phase. Three finalists, EnVision, SPICA, and THESEUS, remain from more than two dozen proposals. A selection will be made in the summer of 2021, with a launch date tentatively set for 2032. In February, the author attended the EnVision conference in Paris, and reported on the progress of that consortium. The THESEUS meeting is meant to be in Malaga, Spain, in May, and the SPICA collaboration was scheduled for March 9–11 in Leiden, The Netherlands. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic intervened and the physical meeting was cancelled. Instead, the group met via Zoom teleconference.

Cosmic Vision is the moniker for the ESA’s current space science campaign. Formulated in 2005, it succeeded the Horizon 2000 Plus campaign and described a number of different mission classes in the fields of astronomy, solar system exploration, and fundamental physics beyond 2015. Early on, it was decided that their overall scientific goals would center around four fundamental questions:

The last time NASA launched astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center, hundreds of thousands of people showed up to watch the final flight of the space shuttle in July 2011. The expectation, by NASA and others, was that similar crowds would show up when commercial crew flights finally began. The large crowds that showed up for launches like the first Falcon Heavy mission in 2018 or even relatively routine cargo launches appeared to confirm that belief, and NASA was planning for big crowds, not just of the public outside the gates of KSC but also official guests and working media inside, for a historic mission.

Then came the pandemic, and all those plans went out the window.

Now NASA is in the unusual, but understandable, position of telling people not to witness in person one of the agency’s biggest missions in the last decade. “We are asking people to watch from home,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Friday in a media teleconference about the upcoming SpaceX Demo-2 commercial crew mission.

To trace the trail of the virus worldwide, Lim’s team is using a new technology called next-generation sequencing at ASU’s Genomics Facility, to rapidly read through all 30,000 chemical letters of the SARS-CoV-2 genetic code, called a genome.

Each sequence is deposited into a worldwide gene bank, run by a nonprofit scientific organization called GISAID. To date, over 16,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences have been deposited GISAID’s EpiCoVTM Database. The sequence data shows that SARS-CoV-2 originated a single source from Wuhan, China, while many of the first Arizona cases analyzed showed travel from Europe as the most likely source.

Now, using a pool of 382 nasal swab samples obtained from possible COVID-19 cases in Arizona, Lim’s team has identified a SARS-CoV-2 mutation that had never been found before—where 81 of the letters have vanished, permanently deleted from the genome.

While COVID-19 has infected millions of people worldwide and killed hundreds of thousands, there is currently no vaccine. In response, researchers have been evaluating the effectiveness of various antiviral drugs as possible COVID-19 treatments.