Lifeboat Foundation

A drug that has shown promising results against coronavirus is going to be tested in four hospitals in Israel as part of a global clinical trial involving around forty clinical centers.

The drug, Selinexor, or XPOVIO as it is currently marketed in the US, has been developed by oncology-focused pharmaceutical company Karyopharm Therapeutics. Co-founded by Israeli scientist Sharon Shacham in 2008, the company is based in the US but maintains a regional office in Israel.

XPOVIO was developed for treating patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. It is FDA approved for this purpose. However, it has the potential to be a tool to fight the coronavirus, and clinical trials are needed to assess its effectiveness, according to Anat Haas Mizrahi, Karyopharm’s Israel general manager; and Dayana Michel, its senior medical director.

Continue reading “Coronavirus drug to be tested on patients in Israel” »

Amazon is partnering with local grocery stores in India to let them sell goods through the company’s ecommerce platform. Under the “Local Shops on Amazon” program, the firm aims to bring small brick and mortar stores online.

The company said the project was in a pilot phase for the last six months with more than 5,000 stores onboard. Now, with the increasing demand for delivered groceries during the coronavirus pandemic, it has decided to formally launch the program. As a part of the launch, the Amazon is pumping ₹10 crores ($1.3 million) into this initiative.

[Read: Google Duo majorly improves low-bandwidth video quality with new codec].

A US Senator says that the White House has “got to get it together.”

Who knew there were so many “smart” ways to unlock a lock? For years companies have been trying to get people to use their phones or keypads or fobs, and now a new startup called Yeeuu Tech has thrown a bunch of methods into one device. The S1 Smart Lock packs eight different unlocking methods, and it can be fitted into most existing locks.

The S1 takes the place of an existing door handle and lock barrel. To unlock it, users can scan their fingerprint, punch in a passcode, use the app via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, use a device with NFC, tap an included custom “badge”, give a voice command through an assistant, or use an old-fashioned mechanical key.

The fingerprint sensor is located on the top in easy thumb reach, and can apparently be read in under half a second. The system can store up to 50 different fingerprints.

After years of studies, test-firings and a survey of U.S. industry in preparation for launch of a Mars Sample Return mission in 2026, NASA has settled on a solid-fueled design for a miniature rocket with a first-of-its-kind purpose: Launching a payload from Mars for a trip back to Earth.

The small launcher is called a Mars Ascent Vehicle, or MAV. The MAV will play a key role in the Mars Sample Return mission being developed by NASA and the European Space Agency.

Continue reading “SpaceX’s Starlink network surpasses 400-satellite mark after successful launch” »

The first EU permits for insects as a “novel food” should be issued in mid-2020. This will end the legal uncertainty about breeding insects for human consumption in Europe. Now is the time to draw lessons from Belgium, which has served as a sandbox for the fledgling industry, about its future prospects. Are we really ready to eat insects?

Romy is an adorable little blond girl who, like all children under the age of 2½ in Belgium, goes to the crèche most weekdays. Her parents spend 20 minutes every evening preparing her lunch, carefully weighing out some carbs, freshly cooked vegetables, a protein-rich ingredient, some high-quality fat and a sprinkling of chopped herbs. It’s the recommended diet for a child her age. But unlike most of Belgium’s children, Romy gets a meal that eventually includes a teaspoon of cricket powder. In fact, she even loves to snack on some whole locusts from time to time. All this thanks to Belgian’s progressive regulatory system, which allowed a whole new sector in the Western agrifood landscape to open up here a few years ago.

In theory, Romy is well on track to help fulfil the prediction, or rather prescription, of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) for insects to become “a high-value source of animal protein for the rapidly growing world population.” But the challenges ahead are huge and Belgium, as a test ground, has gained some valuable experience. Along with a few other countries in Europe, Belgium has taken a bite at insects. But sometimes it hurts.

COVID-19 has only been around for a few months, so at this point scientists don’t know that much about it. But more is being learned every day.

We now know, for example, it can live on surfaces for up to nine days and survives in the air for a few hours. We also now know that the virus particles are shed through saliva and fluids coughed up from the lungs. And that the virus can also be shed from our faeces.

It’s easy for an infected person to spread the virus particles through coughing, touching other people or leaving the virus on surfaces.

👽 Moon Map

Fyodor R.

Have you ever wondered what kind of rocks make up those bright and dark splotches on the moon? Well, the USGS has just released a new authoritative map to help explain the 4.5-billion-year-old history of our nearest neighbor in space.

In a paper published on Nature Communications in 20 April 2020 by (read the original paper), Tianda Fu et al. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst proposed a new kind of diffusive memristor based on the protein nanowires sourced from the bacterium named Geobacter sulfurreducens that can potentially resolve the problem. The artificial neurons built on such memristors can function on the level of biological voltages, and they express “temporary integration feature that is similar to real neurons in our brain” according to the authors.