Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 8216

Investors betting big against catastrophic diseases are watching the World Health Organization closely as insurance bonds tied to whether the organization labels COVID-19 a pandemic are set to mature in June.

In 2017, the World Bank designed a new way to raise money: Pandemic Emergency Financing bonds. Over $425 million worth of such bonds, which bet against a global outbreak of infectious diseases and will default if WHO declares the coronavirus a pandemic, were sold by the World Bank in its first-ever issuance of catastrophe bonds. In the event of no pandemic, investors would be paid a healthy annualized return. Meanwhile, the World Bank could use the bonds to insure itself against the risk of a global outbreak.

“As an investor, we do not want to lose money,” said Chin Liu, a portfolio manager at Amundi Pioneer, a Boston-based firm that purchased the bonds as a way to diversify the company’s $1 billion catastrophe fund. “But then, we also understand if it’s unfortunately triggered, it benefits every single person, including ourselves, to keep the virus controlled.”

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Just as there is a mysterious dark matter that accounts for 85 percent of our universe, there is a “dark” portion of the human genome that has perplexed scientists for decades. A study published March 9, 2020, in Genome Research identifies new portions of the fruit fly genome that, until now, have been hidden in these dark, silent areas.

The collaborative paper titled “Gene Expression Networks in the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel” is the culmination of years of research by Clemson University geneticists Trudy Mackay and Robert Anholt. Their groundbreaking findings could significantly advance science’s understanding of a number of genetic disorders.

The “dark” portion refers to the approximate 98 percent of the genome that doesn’t appear to have any obvious function. Only 2 percent of the human genome codes for proteins, the building blocks of our bodies and the catalysts of the chemical reactions that allow us to thrive. Scientists have been puzzled by this notion since the 1970s when gene sequencing technologies were first developed, revealing the proportion of coding to noncoding regions of the genome.

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The World Health Organization has repeatedly stopped short of calling the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic – until this week.

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon the director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, finally used the term to describe the outbreak, which has now spread to well over 100 countries and infected over 120,000 people.

“WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” Dr Tedros said.

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Rosalind Franklin has been built to try to detect life, past or present, on the Red Planet.

Because of this, the rover and its instruments have been prepared to incredibly stringent levels of cleanliness. This status must now be maintained over the coming two years of storage.

The project’s industrial prime contractor, Thales Alenia Space of Italy, will do this in an ISO-7 chamber at its Turin factory.

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Morello and colleagues studied an antimony nucleus embedded in silicon. The larger antimony nucleus has higher spin than phosphorus. So, in a magnetic field, it has not just two basic states but eight, ranging from pointing in the same direction as the field to pointing in the opposite direction.

In addition, the distribution of electric charge within the nucleus isn’t uniform, with more charge around the poles than the equator. That uneven charge distribution gives experimenters another handle on the nucleus in addition to its spin and magnetism. They can grab it with an oscillating electric field and controllably ease it from one spin state to another or into combinations of any two. All it takes is applying an electric field of the right frequency with a simple electrode, the researchers report.

The researchers discovered the effect by accident, Morello says. For reasons that have nothing to do with quantum computing, they had wanted to study how the antimony nucleus embedded in a silicon chip would react to jolts of the oscillating magnetic field generated by a wire on the chip. But the wire melted and broke, turning the current-carrying wire into a charge-collecting electrode that instead generated an oscillating electric field.

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