GRAND FORKS, N.D. — Many students celebrate completing their Ph.D. with a party. I, ever the space nerd, climbed into a spacesuit instead.
I spent seven years studying remotely at the University of North Dakota (UND) here, which is home to a variety of space-related facilities. I studied crews at the Inflatable Lunar/Mars Habitat — a facility where groups of three or four people live as astronauts for a week or two, including venturing outside in pressurized spacesuits.
Some big M&A is afoot in Israel in the world of smart transportation. According to multiple reports and sources that have contacted TechCrunch, chip giant Intel is in the final stages of a deal to acquire Moovit, a startup that applies AI and big data analytics to track traffic and provide transit recommendations to some 800 million people globally. The deal is expected to close in the coming days at a price believed to be in the region of $1 billion.
We have contacted Nir Erez, the founder and CEO of Moovit, as well as Intel spokespeople for a comment on the reports and will update this story as we learn more. For now, Moovit’s spokesperson has not denied the reports and what we have been told directly.
“At this time we have no comment, but if anything changes I’ll definitely let you know,” Moovit’s spokesperson.
Ladies Monday with Brittany Pettibone.
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UV light kills viruses in air-borne droplets and of the three types of ultraviolet light – UV-A, UV-B and UV-C – UV-C is the most damaging.
UV-C can damage the nucleic acids within an organism and prevent it from replicating. Its use as a disinfectant is fairly common in hospital and laboratory settings.
In Israel, IAI engineers have been working on a system that can work autonomously and automatically in a plane, once given a plan of the aircraft or any other large space.
HOUSTON, May 1, 2020 — Rice University researchers plan to reconfigure their wastewater-treatment technology to capture and deactivate the virus that causes COVID-19. Their chemical-free nanotechnology, introduced earlier this year as a way to kill bacterial “superbugs” and degrade their antibiotic resistance genes in wastewater, will use graphitic carbon nitride to selectively adsorb viruses and then disable them by activating nearby catalysts with light. The team believes that this photocatalytic approach to disinfection — what it calls the “trap-and-zap” treatment approach — could be used to recognize coronaviruses that cause not only COVID-19 but also MERS and SARS.
An injectable antibiotic developed by a team at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem could have a deep impact not only on treating COVID-19 patients, but also on all those affected by antibiotic-resistant infections.
Prof. Yechezkel Barenholz and Dr. Ahuva Cern with their team at the Laboratory of Membrane and Liposome Research at Hadassah-University Medical Center in Jerusalem have been working on improving the performance of drugs in treating different illnesses, including cancer and infectious diseases, for many years. Their method is based on encapsulating the drugs in particles that can be injected into the body.
“We take well-known and established drugs and encapsulate them in two types of particles, called ‘liposomes’ because they are made of lipids, meaning fats,” Barenholz told The Jerusalem Post. “These particles imitate the human cell because they feature a membrane separating the outer world and the inner world of the unit.”
This way the large lipsomes can be injected locally to target the specific area of the body affected, increasing the efficacy of the cure, he said. If the drug was injected without encapsulating it first, it would just disappear before being able to display its effects.
The debate is focused on a subset of gain-of-function studies that manipulate deadly viruses to increase their transmissibility or virulence. “This is what happens to viruses in the wild”, explains Carrie Wolinetz, head of the NIH Office of Science Policy. “Gain-of-function experiments allow us to understand how pandemic viruses evolve, so that we can make predictions, develop countermeasures, and do disease surveillance”. Although none of the widely publicised mishaps of 2014 involved such work, the NIH decided to suspend funding for gain-of-function studies involving influenza, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV.
The US moratorium on gain-of-function experiments has been rescinded, but scientists are split over the benefits—and risks—of such studies. Talha Burki reports.
On Dec 19, 2017, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that they would resume funding gain-of-function experiments involving influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus. A moratorium had been in place since October, 2014. At the time, the NIH had stated that the moratorium “will be effective until a robust and broad deliberative process is completed that results in the adoption of a new US Government gain-of-function research policy”. This process has now concluded. It was spearheaded by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) and led to the development of a new framework for assessing funding decisions for research involving pathogens with enhanced pandemic potential. The release of the framework by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), of which NIH is part, signalled the end of the funding pause.
The situation has its roots in 2011, when the NSABB suppressed two studies involving H5N1 viruses that had been modified to allow airborne transmission from ferret to ferret. They worried that malign actors could replicate the work to deliberately cause an outbreak in human beings. After much debate, the studies were published in full in 2012. HHS subsequently issued guidelines for funding decisions on experiments likely to result in highly pathogenic H5N1 viruses transmissible from mammal to mammal via respiratory droplets. The guidelines were later expanded to include H7N9 viruses.
Circa 2015
Half the world is facing water shortages, so is it time for us all to start drinking recycled sewage?
Many people in the Northwest separate out their table scraps, wilted leaves and old fruit, carting them off eventually to a compost bin or joining their grass clippings and pruning remains in the green waste bin. In the City of Seattle, food waste is required to be separated from garbage.
But most of our actions still revolve around a simple concept: Collect your household waste, sit it on the curb, and somebody will come and pick it up. Businesses do the same thing, just on a larger scale. We have applied industrial-age logic to waste: create a production line that starts at a home or business, automate as many of the tasks as possible, and coordinate through centrally managed processes and destinations.
This centralized approach to waste collection is labor and energy intensive, and it doesn’t give back much.
May the Fourth be with you! Here’s Bionic Bella chatting to LUKE SKYWALKER about her new R2-D2 bionic arm! ✨ 🤩 www.openbionics.com/bella #StarWarsDay
