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Millions of people in India and Bangladesh are in the path of a cyclone which is due to make landfall in less than 36 hours, bringing damaging winds and heavy rain to a region already struggling with the coronavirus pandemic.

Super Cyclone Amphan became the strongest storm ever recorded in the Bay of Bengal on Monday night, after intensifying with sustained wind speeds of up to 270 kilometers per hour (165 miles per hours), according to data from the US Joint Typhoon Warning Center.

Amphan has weakened slightly since, but the storm is still the equivalent of a Category 3 Atlantic hurricane, with winds speeds up to 185 kph (115 mph).

Moderna has accelerated its manufacturing capacity for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate mRNA-1273 and additional future products through a 10-year agreement with Lonza announced today by the companies.

The companies agreed to establish manufacturing suites for Moderna at Lonza’s facilities in the U.S. and Switzerland for the production of mRNA-1273. Technology transfer is expected to begin in June, with the first batches of mRNA-1273 set to be manufactured at Lonza’s U.S. site in July.

Moderna and Lonza also said they intend to establish additional production suites across Lonza’s worldwide facilities, ultimately allowing for the manufacture of material equivalent to up to 1 billion doses of mRNA-1273 per year for use worldwide, based on the currently expected dose of 50 mcg.

A bit of transhuman fiction. It doesn’t take long.


What would it be like to live forever? Writer Richard Dooling explores this question in this fictional piece from Esquire.

Originally published May 1999. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 22, 2001.

1994

March 30: Today I turn forty. I am officially protected by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. If I had an employer, I could now sue him if he discriminated against me because of my, ulp, age. Until now, I’ve half believed in one of Vladimir Nabokov’s elegant syllogisms: Other men die, but I am not other men; therefore, I’ll not die. Nabokov died in 1977. Every time I look in the bathroom mirror, I see Death, the Eternal Footman (looking quite proud), standing in the shadows behind me, holding my coat, snickering. I live with my family in my hometown of Omaha. My selfish genes have managed an immortality of sorts by getting themselves into four delightful children, who are still too young to turn on me. My wife and I have enjoyed nine years of marriage, what Robert Louis Stevenson called “a friendship recognized by the police.” I’m Catholic, so as mortality looms on the far side of the middle-age horizon, I seek consolation in my Christian faith and one of its central tenets: belief in the immortality of my soul. But the lawyer in me also highlights the usual caveats and provisos. According to the Scriptures, my quality of life after death may depend on my ability to love my fellow man. This is a big problem. I forgot to mention that in addition to being a practicing Catholic, I’m also a practicing misanthrope. As I see it, my only chance of avoiding eternal damnation is to stay alive until I learn to love other people. Or until some future pope issues an encyclical providing spiritual guidance for misanthropic Catholics. November 16: My second novel, White Man’s Grave, is a finalist for the National Book Award. For at least a day or two, I wonder if I might be able to achieve immortality by writing great literature. My wife and I fly to the awards ceremony in New York City, where William Gaddis wins the National Book Award in Fiction for A Frolic of His Own.

Scientists are using light waves to accelerate supercurrents and access the unique properties of the quantum world, including forbidden light emissions that one day could be applied to high-speed, quantum computers, communications and other technologies.

The scientists have seen unexpected things in supercurrents—electricity that moves through materials without resistance, usually at super cold temperatures—that break symmetry and are supposed to be forbidden by the conventional laws of physics, said Jigang Wang, a professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University, a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and the leader of the project.

Wang’s lab has pioneered use of light pulses at terahertz frequencies- trillions of pulses per second—to accelerate electron pairs, known as Cooper pairs, within supercurrents. In this case, the researchers tracked light emitted by the accelerated electrons pairs. What they found were “second harmonic ,” or light at twice the frequency of the incoming light used to accelerate electrons.

Then there is the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), a multi-institutional initiative that includes The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The goal of this initiative is to create new natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to scour scientific and medical literature to help researchers prioritize potential therapies to evaluate for further study. AI is also being used to automate screening at checkpoints by evaluating temperature via thermal cameras, as well as modulations in sweat and skin discoloration. What’s more, AI-powered robots have even been used to monitor and treat patients. In Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic, an entire field hospital was transitioned into a “smart hospital” fully staffed by AI robotics.

Any time of great challenge is a time of great change. The waves of technological innovation that are occurring now will echo throughout eternity. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are experiencing a call to mobilization that will forever alter the fabric of discovery in the fields of bioengineering, biomimicry and artificial intelligence. The promise of tomorrow will be perpetuated by the pangs of today. It is the symbiosis of all these fields that will power future innovations.

In an effort to create first-of-kind microelectronic devices that connect with biological systems, University of Maryland (UMD) researchers are utilizing CRISPR technology in a novel way to electronically turn “on” and “off” several genes simultaneously. Their technique, published in Nature Communications, has the potential to further bridge the gap between the electronic and biological worlds, paving the way for new wearable and “smart” devices.

“Faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, we now have an even deeper understanding of how ‘smart’ devices could benefit the general population,” said William E. Bentley, professor in UMD’s Fischell Department of Bioengineering and Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR), and director of the Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices. “Imagine what the world would be like if we could wear a device and access an app on our smartphone capable of detecting whether the wearer has the active virus, generated immunity, or has not been infected. We don’t have this yet, but it is increasingly clear that a suite of technologies enabling rapid transfer of information between biology and electronics is needed to make this a reality.”

With such a , this information could be used, for example, to dynamically and autonomously conduct effective contact tracing, Bentley said.

“The number of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases in Austria dropped from 90 to 10 cases per one million people, two weeks after the government required everyone to wear a face mask on April 6.”


Austria managed to slow down the rate of coronavirus cases in the country by 90% after requiring everyone to wear a face mask. Meanwhile, other countries are struggling to keep the number of cases and fatalities low.

Every once in a while I have a contentious discussion with someone about traveling to Mars, and the risks involved. One of the hardest risks to describe is the threat from galactic cosmic rays. Here is a short article about a new facility investigating the effects of galactic cosmic rays.

The very important point here is that we are not discussing electromagnetic radiation. These ions have been shown to sometimes penetrate spacecraft and inflict damage on astronauts brains. Earthlings do not have to worry about these as much because we have a magnetosphere that shields us from ions.


To better understand and mitigate the health risks faced by astronauts from exposure to space radiation, we ideally need to be able to test the effects of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) here on Earth under laboratory conditions. An article publishing on May 19, 2020 in the open access journal PLOS Biology from Lisa Simonsen and colleagues at the NASA Langley Research Center, USA, describes how NASA has developed a ground-based GCR Simulator at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL), located at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Galactic cosmic rays comprise a mixture of highly energetic protons, , and higher charge and energy ions ranging from lithium to iron, and they are extremely difficult to shield against. These ions interact with spacecraft materials and to create a complex mixed field of primary and secondary particles.