Lifeboat Foundation

The deadly animal-borne coronavirus spreading globally may have originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan linked to China’s covert biological weapons program, said an Israeli biological warfare analyst.

Radio Free Asia last week rebroadcast a Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China’s most advanced virus research laboratory, known the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses.

The first case of novel coronavirus was confirmed in Orange County Saturday, health officials said.

The Orange County Health Care Agency’s Communicable Disease Control Division, which received confirmation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the infected person is a traveler from Wuhan, China.

The respiratory disease has sickened 1,975 people and killed 56, almost all in Wuhan.

Sorry, might be a re-post, new source (r;ns)

Fighting cancer can sometimes feel like a game of Whack-A-Mole – even after a primary tumor is removed the disease can crop up again in other organs. Now, researchers at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research have developed a drug that can prevent cancer from spreading.

Previous research has shown that before tumors start to spread, they secrete substances that prepare new places for them to settle down. One way in which the disease does this is by making blood vessels in the area “leaky,” allowing the cancer to penetrate them easier. And it’s this process that the new drug, created by researchers at the Harry Perkins Institute, prevents.

Continue reading “New drug may keep cancer metastasis under control” »

Medical science has been this optimistic before about finding a cure for Alzheimer’s, but in most cases the scientists, patients and their families have suffered serious disappointment. The bitter truth is that over 99 percent of all clinical trials for Alzheimer’s treatments end in failure. For now it is not only incurable, but a major mystery and irreversible. The chemical basis for the disease is still unclear. The research is directed in many directions and based on very different assumptions and approaches.

One focus in recent years is based on the “amyloid assumption,” which says the amyloid beta peptide plays a major role in the development of the disease. The accumulation of the “sticky” amyloid protein plaques is responsible for the damage, by building up into clumps that can cause inflammation in the brain and the death of neurons. These plaques are the main target of most Alzheimer’s research today. Almost 90 percent of the scientific resources in Alzheimer’s research are devoted to developing drugs and treatments to reduce the concentrations and activity of amyloid beta in the brain.

Millions suffer from conditions without known causes. Some contend with constant pain, many live with unrelenting mental anguish. None of them know why.

Now a groundbreaking theory of brain illness — presented in a thrilling new book by science journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa called “The Angel and the Assassin” (Ballantine Books) — offers big answers by pointing to the tiny packages called microglia.

Microglia are long-dismissed free-floating brain cells located all over the brain, making up 10 percent of the cells that populate the inside of our skulls. According to emerging research, these cells appear to play a significant role in a host of conditions including Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury, anxiety disorders and more.

It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that even the idea of an electric Ferrari was controversial. Indeed, it was 2016 when then-Ferrari Chairman Sergio Marchionne said that, “with Ferrari, (an electric car) is almost an obscene concept,” before he finished up with, “you’d have to shoot me first.” Well, Sergio– times sure do change, don’t they? At least, that’s what a series of plans for an electric Ferrari from a leaked patent filing would seem to say about the matter!

In fairness to Marchionne, he would pass on before Ferrari built a pure electric car, succumbing as he did to cancer at the age of 66. Tragic as that was, what isn’t tragic is Ferrari joining the rest of the automotive universe in the 21st century with plans to build a for-real battery-powered Ferrari by 2025.

The push for Ferrari to finally go electric was, no doubt, accelerated by the success of the electric Porsche Taycan and, obviously, the rapid growth of Tesla (and, likely, the staggering growth of TSLA stock). With the launch of its first PHEV last year and recently announced plans to go “60% hybrid by 2022”, then, the step towards all-electric seems ready to happen.

Artificial intelligence helped detect an outbreak of the coronavirus one week before the CDC issued a warning.

The BlueDot algorithm scours news reports and airline ticketing data to predict the spread of diseases like those linked to the flu outbreak in China.

The University of Queensland (UQ) announced on Friday it has been asked to develop a vaccine for the recent Chinese coronavirus outbreak, using the university’s recently developed rapid response technology.

In a statement, the university announced it had received a request to develop a vaccine from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which describes itself as “an innovative partnership between public, private, philanthropic, and civil organisations” which seeks to develop vaccines to protect the world against outbreaks.

Head of the university’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, Professor Paul Young, said in a statement that UQ has novel technology for the rapid development of vaccines, which could provide a vaccine within six months.