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May 16, 2020

FDA OKs 1st Stem Cell Human Trial for COVID-19

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The stem cell treatment is derived from human placentas and is being developed by New Jersey biotech company Celularity. The early-stage trial will include up to 86 coronavirus patients with symptoms who will receive infusions of the stem cell therapy to assess the its safety and whether it prevents the patients from developing more severe illness, The New York Times.

The stem cells from the placenta used in this treatment are “natural killer” cells that guard a developing fetus or newborn from viruses in the mother. Celularity has been testing this treatment approach in cancer patients.

Initial results from the early trial are expected 30 to 60 days after the first patients receive their dose, Dr. Robert Hariri, Celularity’s founder and chief executive, told The Times.

May 16, 2020

Dr Robert Hariri Talks of Using Stem Cell Therapies for Human Health and Aging

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, health, robotics/AI

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Dr. Robert Hariri, MD, PhD, surgeon, bio-medical scientist and highly successful serial entrepreneur in two technology sectors: bio-medicine and aerospace.

Dr. hariri utilizes biomedicine to aid human longevity:

Continue reading “Dr Robert Hariri Talks of Using Stem Cell Therapies for Human Health and Aging” »

May 16, 2020

Believe it or not, this US-built fast e-bike hits 45 mph and 80 miles of range

Posted by in category: transportation

The HPC Scout Pro electric bicycle, which can hit 45 mph (72 km/h), doesn’t fit neatly into any of the standard electric bicycle classes.

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes can reach speeds of 20 mph (32 km/h) while Class 3 e-bikes reach 28 mph (45 km/h). I used to think Class 3 e-bikes were fast. Now I think the system needs more classes.

May 16, 2020

Astrophysicists Warn That Entire Galaxies “Are Being Killed”

Posted by in categories: energy, space

Cosmic Starvation

The first possibility is called ram pressure stripping, a process through which all of the gas that a galaxy would use to form stars is vacuumed away by nearby intergalactic plasma. The other is that the environment inside a galactic cluster simply becomes too hot for cosmic gases to cool and condense into stars, rendering it useless as fuel.

“When you remove the fuel for star formation, you effectively kill the galaxy,” Brown writes, “turning it into a dead object in which no new stars are formed.”

May 16, 2020

Obama says epidemic “spiraling out of control”, outlines US action

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, economics, health, military

US President Barack Obama called the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a threat to global security on Tuesday and broadly expanded the US response by ordering thousands of troops to the region along with an aggressive effort to train health care workers and build treatment centres.
He called on other countries to quickly provide more helpers, supplies and money.
“If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people affected, with profound economic, political and security implications for all of us,” Obama declared after briefings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Obama acted under pressure from regional leaders and international aid organisations who pleaded for a heightened US role in confronting the deadly virus, especially in the hardest-hit countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
“In West Africa, Ebola is now an epidemic,” Obama said.
“It’s spiralling out of control, it is getting worse.“
The stepped-up US response includes sending 3,000 troops to the region, including medics and corpsmen for treatment and training, engineers to help build treatment facilities and logistics specialists to assist in patient transportation.
Obama also announced that Major General Darryl Williams, head of US Army Africa, will head a military command centre based in Liberia.
The announcement came the same day the World Health Organisation warned that the number of West African Ebola cases could begin doubling every three weeks and that the crisis could end up costing nearly 1 billion US Dollars to contain.
Nearly 5,000 people have become ill from Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal since it was first recognised in March.
The World Health Organisation says it anticipates the figure could rise to more than 20,000.
Obama described task ahead as “daunting” but said what gives him hope is that “the world knows how to fight this disease.“
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May 16, 2020

George W. Bush Urged Us to Prepare for Future Pandemics in 2005 | NowThis

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

‘If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare’ — George W. Bush warned about getting ahead of something like COVID-19 way back in 2005.
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In US news and current events today, listen to Pres. Bush urgently stress the importance of being prepared for a pandemic back in 2005. In this clip, Pres. George W. Bush addressed the Nat’l Institutes of Health about having a game plan to fight future pandemics. Pres. Bush was reportedly alarmed after reading a history book about the 1918 flu pandemic where millions had died. Out of that interest came a grand outline for future administrations to follow in response to a global pandemic.

Continue reading “George W. Bush Urged Us to Prepare for Future Pandemics in 2005 | NowThis” »

May 16, 2020

Is Elon Musk going to Move Tesla and SpaceX to Texas?

Posted by in categories: disruptive technology, Elon Musk, space
Tesla sporting NASA Worm Logo and Meatball in advance of human rocket launch.

According to a report from a CBS affiliate in Wichita Falls, Tex., Texas Governor Greg Abbott told a local television reporter he had the opportunity to talk to Elon Musk and he’s genuinely interested in Texas and genuinely frustrated with California.

Tesla stopped making cars at its Fremont plant on March 23. Elon Musk shared frequently his views that the state and local restrictions aimed at mitigating the spread of the coronavirus were actually not in the best interest of California, the people of California, and not Tesla either.

Why is Tesla Fremont important?


Looking back in history, the GM automotive assembly plant in South Fremont used to be the town’s largest employer. In the 1980s, the plant became a joint venture automotive assembly plant of Toyota and GM, and renamed NUMMI becoming one of the most effective small car factories for GM. In early 2010, NUMMI came to an end and closed. Enter TESLA to rescue Fremont. Tesla acquired part of the plant and in June 2010 by Elon Musk earmarked it as Tesla’s primary production plant. By 2017, Tesla was the largest employer in Fremont with roughly 10,000 employees.

Ten years after Tesla swooped in and brought 10,000 jobs to Fremont, Elon Musk is not so happy.

May 16, 2020

Tesla Fast Tracking Full Self-Driving Development With Advanced Neural Net Training Techniques

Posted by in categories: innovation, robotics/AI

Autonomous driving has been one of the fundamental pillars of Tesla’s push to electrify transport, and by all accounts, the California company is leading the pack in production deployments of autonomous driving technology.

The team of engineers at Tesla working on AI are some of the brightest minds in the space and continue to roll out new, innovative ways of not only processing and interpreting computer vision, but in developing new methods to train its AI. It’s the digital equivalent of building the machine that builds the machine, the virtual equivalent to taking a step up the chain from designing automobiles to designing the manufacturing machines, processes, and systems that build them.

Continue reading “Tesla Fast Tracking Full Self-Driving Development With Advanced Neural Net Training Techniques” »

May 16, 2020

Verge opens pre-orders for its outrageous hubless electric motorcycle

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

You can now order yourself a Finnish electric motorcycle with lots of torque, lots of range and a very unique look. Oh, and it’s also got a jaw-dropping, gaping hole where the middle of the back wheel would normally be.

We first saw this fancy Finnish design back in 2018. At that stage, it was known as the RMK E2, although since it made its public debut, the company has changed its name to Verge and the bike is now known as the TS.

Now, it’s ready for production and we can put some final numbers to it. The centerless hub motor that constitutes the rear wheel will deliver 80 kW (107 horsepower) and 1,000 Nm (738 lb-ft) of torque. According to Verge, that’ll get you to 100 km/h (62 mph) in less than 4 seconds, which is plenty quick but will see the back of a well-ridden superbike.

May 16, 2020

A ‘frozen electric-field’ approach to simulate repetitively pulsed nanosecond plasma discharges and ignition of hydrogen–air mixtures

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, evolution

High-fidelity modelling of nanosecond repetitively pulsed discharges (NRPDs) is burdened by the multiple time and length scales and large chemistry mechanisms involved, which prohibit detailed analyses and parametric studies. In the present work, we propose a ‘frozen electric-field’ modelling approach to expedite the NRPD simulations without adverse effects on the solution accuracy. First, a burst of nanosecond voltage pulses is simulated self-consistently until the discharge reaches a stationary state. The calculated spatial distributions and temporal evolution of the electric field, electron density and electron energy during the last pulse are then stored in a library and the electrical characteristics of subsequent pulses are frozen at these values. This strategy allows the timestep for numerical integration to be increased by four orders of magnitude (from 10−13 to 10−9 s), thereby significantly improving the computational efficiency of the process. Reduced calculations of a burst of 50 discharge pulses show good agreement with the predictions from a complete plasma model (electrical characteristics calculated during each pulse). The error in species densities is less than 20% at the centre of the discharge volume and about 30% near the boundaries. The deviations in temperature, however, are much lower, at 5% in the entire domain. The model predictions are in excellent agreement with measured ignition delay times and temperatures in H2–air mixtures subject to dielectric barrier NRPD over a pressure range of 54–144 Torr with equivalence ratios of 0.7–1.2. The OH density increases with pressure and triggers low-temperature fuel oxidation, which leads to rapid temperature rise and ignition. The ignition delay decreases by a factor of 2, with an increase in pressure from 54 to 144 Torr. In contrast, an increase in the H2–air equivalence ratio from 0.7 to 1.2 marginally decreases the ignition delay by about 20%. This behaviour is attributed to the insensitivity of OH production rates to the variation in the equivalence ratio.