Lifeboat Foundation

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — All it took was a few sturdy swings with a sledgehammer and a prized painting by Vincent van Gogh was gone.

A Dutch crime-busting television show has aired security camera footage showing how an art thief smashed his way through reinforced glass doors at a museum in the early hours of March 30. He later hurried out through the museum gift shop with a Vincent van Gogh painting tucked under his right arm and the sledgehammer in his left hand.

Police hope that publicizing the images will help them track down the thief who stole Van Gogh’s “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring 1884” from the Singer Laren Museum while it was shut down due to coronavirus containment measures.

China’s expanding aircraft carrier fleet needs fighters — and they might be stealthy.

By Caleb Larson

The US government has contingency plans in place in the event North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un should die after reports that his health was in grave condition.

Sources discussed the plans but urged caution about the veracity of the reports, which claimed Kim is in bad shape after a cardiovascular procedure, Fox News reported.

Those plans include the possibility of a mass-scale humanitarian crisis inside the hermit nation such as a famine, according to the report.

SINGAPORE — Less than a week after a record 12.9 tonnes of pangolin scales were seized from a container by the authorities here, another 12.7 tonnes have been uncovered in a joint operation by the National Parks Board (NParks), Singapore Customs and the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA).

The 40ft (12m) container that was on its way by ship from Nigeria to Vietnam was declared to contain “cassia seeds” but was found on Monday (April 8) to be holding the animal parts, estimated to be worth about $51.6 million, in 474 bags at the Pasir Panjang Scanning Station.

The haul came from two species, the white-bellied tree pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis) and the giant ground pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) and are likely to have come from 21,000 pangolins.

An artificial neural network can reveal patterns in huge amounts of gene expression data, and discover groups of disease-related genes. This has been shown by a new study led by researchers at Linköping University, published in Nature Communications. The scientists hope that the method can eventually be applied within precision medicine and individualised treatment.

It’s common when using social media that the platform suggests people whom you may want to add as friends. The suggestion is based on you and the other person having common contacts, which indicates that you may know each other. In a similar manner, scientists are creating maps of biological networks based on how different proteins or genes interact with each other. The researchers behind a new study have used artificial intelligence, AI, to investigate whether it is possible to discover biological networks using deep learning, in which entities known as “artificial neural networks” are trained by experimental data. Since artificial neural networks are excellent at learning how to find patterns in enormous amounts of complex data, they are used in applications such as image recognition. However, this machine learning method has until now seldom been used in biological research.

“We have for the first time used deep learning to find disease-related genes. This is a very powerful method in the analysis of huge amounts of biological information, or ‘big data’,” says Sanjiv Dwivedi, postdoc in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM) at Linköping University.

Chinese research i think.

Developing an effective universal influenza vaccine against influenza virus with highly conserved antigenic epitopes could induce a broad-spectrum immune response to prevent infection.

(An epitope, also known as antigenic determinant, is the part of an antigen that is recognized by the immune system, specifically by antibodies, B cells, or T cells. For example, the epitope is the specific piece of the antigen to which an antibody binds. See picture1)

Continue reading “👽 Universal Vaccine, a consideration?” »

Toxic oil pollution has been detected in thousands of fish in the Gulf of Mexico, 10 years after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The spill was the largest in U.S. history and released millions of gallons of oil into the ocean.

Three decades and $23.7 billion later, the 25,000-ton International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is close to becoming something like the sun.

This is pretty cool:

The vaccine targets the novel coronavirus’s Achilles’ heel, its Receptor Binding Motif (RBM), a critical structure that enables the virus to bind to and infect a target cell. According to Prof. Gershoni, the vaccine would reconstruct the coronavirus’s RBM, a tiny feature of its “spike” protein. Though the virus uses many different proteins to replicate and invade cells, the “spike” protein is the major surface protein that it uses to bind to a receptor — another protein that acts like a doorway into a human cell. After the spike protein binds to the human cell receptor, the viral membrane fuses with the human cell membrane, allowing the genome of the virus to enter human cells and begin infection.

Tel Aviv University’s Professor Jonathan Gershoni has been awarded a US patent for a novel coronavirus vaccine design.