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Archive for the ‘biotech/medical’ category: Page 1605

May 5, 2020

Firm tests UV light treatment that Trump was mocked for mentioning

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Aytu BioScience announced on April 20, four days before the Trump remarks, that it has signed an exclusive licensing deal with Cedars Sanai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The center has developed and is testing a UV-A “Healight” designed to be inserted via a catheter inside the trachea to kill pathogens, including the coronavirus.

Ultraviolet, or UV, light is commonly used by physicians to treat skin iseases. Cedars-Sanai says UV-A phototherapy potentially could be employed in internal organs.


President Trump has been mocked relentlessly for suggesting that ultraviolet light could be brought “inside the body” to kill the coronavirus, but there is ongoing research to do just that.

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May 5, 2020

Coronavirus Florida: Bradenton ‘church’ ordered to stop selling bleach as COVID-19 miracle cure

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Fyodor Rouge, this is the church I was telling you about.


The Bradenton-based organization falsely claims that the treatment is effective for a number of conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, brain disease, cancer, HIV and AIDS, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

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May 4, 2020

Iran launches its first military satellite

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, military

As the world grapples with the coronavirus pandemic and historically low oil prices, the missile launch may signal a new willingness to take risks by Iran.


It said the satellite — dubbed the Nour — was deployed from the Qassed two-stage launcher from the Markazi desert, a vast expanse in Iran’s central plateau.

The satellite “orbited the Earth at 425km [264 miles]”, said the website. “This action will be a great success and a new development in the field of space for Islamic Iran.”

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May 4, 2020

How a Retrovirus or RNA Virus Works

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

COVID-19’s genes are encoded in RNA instead of DNA. COVID-19 uses reverse transcriptase to transform its single-stranded RNA into double-stranded DNA. It is DNA that stores the genome of human cells and cells from other higher life forms. Once transformed from RNA to DNA, the new COVID-19 DNA can be integrated into the genome of the infected cells. When the DNA versions of the retroviral genes have been incorporated into the genome, the cell then is tricked into copying those genes as part of its normal replication process and making millions of COVID-19 cells… In other words, the cell does the work of the virus for it.

That’s why it was necessary to upgrade Stem Cell Neurotherapy for COVID-19 by adding T-Cells, B-Cells, and Natural Killer Cells to the arsenal. It was not enough to just regenerate new lung cells to replace the lung cells infected by COVID-19, but the COVID-19 Virus Cells had to be attacked and destroyed, and its RNA single strand had to be unraveled, in order to prevent them from invading and infecting the newly regenerated lung cells.


A retrovirus is a virus whose genes are encoded in RNA, and, using an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, replicates itself by first reverse-coding its genes into the DNA of the cells it infects. Like other viruses, retroviruses need to use the cellular machinery of the organisms they infect to make copies of themselves. However, infection by a retrovirus requires an additional step. The retrovirus genome needs to be reverse-transcribed into DNA before it can be copied in the usual way. The enzyme that does this backward transcription is known as reverse transcriptase.

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May 4, 2020

Pathogen Mishaps Rise as Regulators Stay Clear

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, government

We are being told that mistakes can not happen in labs. I for one do not believe such, so let me take you on a trip down memory lane to 2014, around the same year funding of gain of function was stopped.

Lab workers at different sites accidentally jabbed themselves with needles contaminated by anthrax or West Nile virus. An air-cleaning system meant to filter dangerous microbes out of a lab failed, but no one knew because the alarms had been turned off. A batch of West Nile virus, improperly packed in dry ice, burst open at a Federal Express shipping center. Mice infected with bubonic plague or Q fever went missing. And workers exposed to Q fever, brucellosis or tuberculosis did not realize it until they either became ill or blood tests detected the exposure.


The recent number of mistakes documented at federal laboratories involving anthrax, flu and smallpox viruses have contributed to a debate over lax government oversight at high-level containment labs.

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May 4, 2020

France’s first Covid-19 case ‘dates back to December’, flu retest shows

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, security

Murphy’s Law: Everything that can go wrong will in fact go wrong.

Here is how to set the table for Murphy’s Law and become the epic center in the world for the COVID-19:

A. Eliminate the entire global health security team at the White House. Their job? Managing pandemics like COVID-19.

Continue reading “France’s first Covid-19 case ‘dates back to December’, flu retest shows” »

May 4, 2020

SPICA: an infrared telescope to look back into the early universe

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The ESA’s fifth call for medium-class missions (M5) is in its full study phase. Three finalists, EnVision, SPICA, and THESEUS, remain from more than two dozen proposals. A selection will be made in the summer of 2021, with a launch date tentatively set for 2032. In February, the author attended the EnVision conference in Paris, and reported on the progress of that consortium. The THESEUS meeting is meant to be in Malaga, Spain, in May, and the SPICA collaboration was scheduled for March 9–11 in Leiden, The Netherlands. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic intervened and the physical meeting was cancelled. Instead, the group met via Zoom teleconference.

Cosmic Vision is the moniker for the ESA’s current space science campaign. Formulated in 2005, it succeeded the Horizon 2000 Plus campaign and described a number of different mission classes in the fields of astronomy, solar system exploration, and fundamental physics beyond 2015. Early on, it was decided that their overall scientific goals would center around four fundamental questions:

May 4, 2020

Commercial crew safety, in space and on the ground

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, space travel

The last time NASA launched astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center, hundreds of thousands of people showed up to watch the final flight of the space shuttle in July 2011. The expectation, by NASA and others, was that similar crowds would show up when commercial crew flights finally began. The large crowds that showed up for launches like the first Falcon Heavy mission in 2018 or even relatively routine cargo launches appeared to confirm that belief, and NASA was planning for big crowds, not just of the public outside the gates of KSC but also official guests and working media inside, for a historic mission.

Then came the pandemic, and all those plans went out the window.

Now NASA is in the unusual, but understandable, position of telling people not to witness in person one of the agency’s biggest missions in the last decade. “We are asking people to watch from home,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Friday in a media teleconference about the upcoming SpaceX Demo-2 commercial crew mission.

May 4, 2020

ASU scientific team finds new, unique mutation in coronavirus study

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, genetics

To trace the trail of the virus worldwide, Lim’s team is using a new technology called next-generation sequencing at ASU’s Genomics Facility, to rapidly read through all 30,000 chemical letters of the SARS-CoV-2 genetic code, called a genome.

Each sequence is deposited into a worldwide gene bank, run by a nonprofit scientific organization called GISAID. To date, over 16,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences have been deposited GISAID’s EpiCoVTM Database. The sequence data shows that SARS-CoV-2 originated a single source from Wuhan, China, while many of the first Arizona cases analyzed showed travel from Europe as the most likely source.

Now, using a pool of 382 nasal swab samples obtained from possible COVID-19 cases in Arizona, Lim’s team has identified a SARS-CoV-2 mutation that had never been found before—where 81 of the letters have vanished, permanently deleted from the genome.

May 4, 2020

MU researcher identifies four possible treatments for COVID-19

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

While COVID-19 has infected millions of people worldwide and killed hundreds of thousands, there is currently no vaccine. In response, researchers have been evaluating the effectiveness of various antiviral drugs as possible COVID-19 treatments.