Lifeboat Foundation

A tale of GS-441524, the remdesivir sister drug that cures coronavirus (FIP) in cats, but that Gilead refused to develop for fear it would mess up the approval process of remdesivir.

Yes, it a tale of capitalism on steroids, and the FDA on drugs. It’s the kind of thing that may well kill you and your family, but you will never know about it (unless you read about it in The Atlantic, or some obscure journal).

Cat owners are resorting to China’s underground marketplace to buy antivirals for a feline coronavirus.

With more and more people contracting COVID-19, physician-scientists around the world are looking at existing drugs as potential treatments for the novel coronavirus.

Among them are cancer researchers launching new clinical trials or participating in multi-site ones to see whether drugs proven to be effective for another disease, particularly cancer, can help in treating COVID-19 cases.

At Miami Cancer Institute, part of Baptist Health South Florida, researchers are conducting several trials to investigate whether existing cancer drugs might provide some kind of therapy for COVID-19. The rationale: Cancer patients have similar immune system problems as coronavirus patients — namely, dangerous inflammation — and these medications effectively attack that problem.

Oxford University scientists leading the global search for a coronavirus vaccine are to recruit “very healthy” over-55s to help with clinical trials.

The next phase of testing will focus on how older adults’ immune systems respond, the Oxford vaccine group said on Friday.

Continue reading “Oxford University calls for 10,000 volunteers as coronavirus vaccine testing enters next stage” »

To encourage businesses to invest in new technologies, the European Union funds industrial research partnerships worth billions of euros in fields such as clean aviation and hydrogen fuel cells. It also offers direct grants to tech startups, and when Horizon Europe launches next year, it plans to offer them equity investments, too.

Report says scientific output is not translating into innovation.

Summary: Tau spreads through the human brain via neural communication pathways. The spread is accelerated by the presence of amyloid-beta.

Source: Lund University

Toxic versions of the protein tau are believed to cause death of neurons of the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. A new study published in Nature Communications shows that the spread of toxic tau in the human brain in elderly individuals may occur via connected neurons. The researchers could see that beta-amyloid facilitates the spread of toxic tau.

New machine learning methods bring insights into how lithium ion batteries degrade, and show it’s more complicated than many thought.

Lithium-ion batteries lose their juice over time, causing scientists and engineers to work hard to understand that process in detail. Now, scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have combined sophisticated machine learning algorithms with X-ray tomography data to produce a detailed picture of how one battery component, the cathode, degrades with use.

The new study, published this month in Nature Communications, focused on how to better visualize what’s going on in cathodes made of nickel-manganese-cobalt, or NMC. In these cathodes, NMC particles are held together by a conductive carbon matrix, and researchers have speculated that one cause of performance decline could be particles breaking away from that matrix. The team’s goal was to combine cutting-edge capabilities at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) to develop a comprehensive picture of how NMC particles break apart and break away from the matrix and how that might contribute to performance losses.

“Once a chip is designed, adding security after the fact or making changes to address newly discovered threats is nearly impossible,” explains a DARPA spokesperson.

In their latest analysis, first presented at a seminar in March, the LHCb physicists found that several measurements involving the decay of B mesons conflict slightly with the predictions of the standard model of particle physics—the reigning set of equations describing the subatomic world. Taken alone, each oddity looks like a statistical fluctuation, and they may all evaporate with additional data, as has happened before. But their collective drift suggests that the aberrations may be breadcrumbs leading beyond the standard model to a more complete theory.

“For the first time in certainly my working life, there are a confluence of different decays that are showing anomalies that match up,” said Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College London who is part of LHCb.

The B meson is so named because it contains a bottom quark, one of six fundamental quark particles that account for most of the universe’s visible matter. For unknown reasons, the quarks break down into three generations: heavy, medium, and light, each with quarks of opposite electric charge. Heavier quarks decay into their lighter variations, almost always switching their charge, too. For instance, when the negatively charged heavy bottom quark in a B meson drops a generation, it usually becomes a middleweight, positively charged “charm” quark.

Microsoft is laying off more than 50 journalists to replace them with AI for Microsoft News and MSN. It’s part of a bigger push to rely on AI for news curation on its homepages and Microsoft’s Edge browser.