Lifeboat Foundation

This week, the U.S. government approved the first blood test in the country that will look for the antibodies produced by the body to fight the novel coronavirus. Such a test can reveal whether someone is actively infected by the virus, as well as whether they were previously infected but recovered. While these tests are very much needed to better understand the scale of the outbreak, they have a few major limitations.

On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration issued an Emergency Use Authorization to a covid-19 antibody test developed by the company Cellex. The test looks for two types of antibodies, IgM and IgG, created by the body’s immune system in response to the new coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2. The test, which requires blood drawn from a vein, can return results within 15 to 20 minutes, though the testing itself has to be done in a certified laboratory, not at a doctor’s office, unlike some other rapid covid-19 tests.

Weighing an idea that might once have been relegated to science fiction, Italy once again finds itself in the unfortunate vanguard of Western democracies grappling with the coronavirus.

A recent study published in JAMA Neurology identifies certain neurological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease in the brains of older adults with sleep apnea.

A trial drug called APN01 or human recombinant soluble ACE2 (hrsACE2) can significantly block early stages of SARS-CoV-2 infections, according to a paper published in the journal Cell.

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In these troubled times, enforced home-working is producing remarkable results for physicists and astronomers.

A Google interview candidate recently asked me: “What are three big science questions that keep you up at night?” This was a great question because one’s answer reveals so much about one’s intellectual interests — here are mine:

Q1: Can we imitate “thinking” from only observing behavior?

Suppose you have a large fleet of autonomous vehicles with human operators driving them around diverse road conditions. We can observe the decisions made by the human, and attempt to use imitation learning algorithms to map robot observations to the steering decisions that the human would take.

Because crises shape history, there are hundreds of thinkers who have devoted their lives to studying how they unfold. This work – what we might call the field of “crisis studies” – charts how, whenever crisis visits a given community, the fundamental reality of that community is laid bare. Who has more and who has less. Where the power lies. What people treasure and what they fear.

Times of upheaval are always times of radical change. Some believe the pandemic is a once-in-a-generation chance to remake society and build a better future. Others fear it may only make existing injustices worse. By Peter C Baker.

Staffing shortages amid the 386,000 VA employees are “a root cause for many of the problems in veterans’ care,” said Inspector General Michael Missal.

There are two main reasons for the shortages — low salaries and a lack of qualified applicants, with the former leading to the latter.

Consider this item from the report: VA “medical center directors make approximately 25% of a private sector hospital chief executive officer salary yet have a greater scope of responsibility.” Top pay for a VA medical center director is $201,900.