Lifeboat Foundation

During World War II, an amazing amount of innovation, including radar, reliable torpedoes, and code-breaking, helped end the war faster. This will be the same with the pandemic. I break the innovation into five categories: treatments, vaccines, testing, contact tracing, and policies for opening up. Without some advances in each of these areas, we cannot return to the business as usual or stop the virus. Below, I go through each area in some detail.

The scientific advances we need to stop COVID-19.

By Bill Gates

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

This is my business, but I bet many never heard of this:

There’s diamond under them thar plants. A geologist has discovered a thorny, palmlike plant in Liberia that seems to grow only on top of kimberlite pipes—columns of volcanic rock hundreds of meters across that extend deep into Earth, left by ancient eruptions that exhumed diamonds from the mantle. If the plant is as choosy as it seems to be, diamond hunters in West Africa will have a simple, powerful way of finding diamond-rich deposits. Prospectors are going to “jump on it like crazy,” says Steven Shirey, a geologist specializing in diamond research at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

Miners have long known that particular plants can signal ore-bearing rocks. For example, Lychnis alpina, a small pink-flowering plant in Scandinavia, and Haumaniastrum katangense, a white-flowered shrub in central Africa, are both associated with copper. That’s because the plants are especially tolerant to copper that has eroded into soils from the mother lodes.

Continue reading “Rare African plant signals diamonds beneath the soil” »

#Hackers are seeking to exploit the roll-out of government financial relief plans to fill their own pockets at the expense of businesses and affected workers, Israeli cyber researchers have revealed.

Hackers are exploiting the rollout of governmental financial relief to fill their pockets at the expense of businesses and affected workers, according to Israeli cyber researchers.

In recent weeks, governments have sought to ease cash-flow shortages and avoid a recession with ambitious stimulus packages and grants to households, including a massive $2 trillion economic package in the United States.

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Washington (AFP) — The wealthy Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation called Wednesday for global cooperation to ready COVID-19 vaccines for seven billion people, while offering $150 million toward developing therapeutics and treatments for the virus.

While it is likely to take as many as 18 months to develop and fully test a safe coronavirus vaccine, global authorities and businesses need to start now on plans to manufacture it, said foundation chief executive Mark Suzman.

“It’s normal to have, at maximum, hundreds of millions of doses manufactured,” he said.

Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., issued a small-business innovation research (SBIR) solicitation (HR001120S0019-05) for the Wearable Laser Detection and Alert System.

DARPA researchers want to understand the feasibility of a wearable laser sensor that can detect laser irradiation rapidly during the day and at night and alert the wearer in real-time of lasing.

DARPA wants a wearable laser-detection system with low size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP) that would act as a stand-alone sensor to detect laser illumination over the 450-to-1600-nanometer visible to shortwave infrared region.

Between the summer of 1665 and the spring of 1667, Isaac Newton developed his theories on calculus, optics, and the laws of motion and gravity. He was quarantining during the Bubonic Plague and found the extra time on his hands gave him the freedom to pursue intellectual endeavors his day-to-day duties may have otherwise squandered.

Nearly 400 years later, history could be repeating itself.

With decades of work at the intersection of time, space, and elementary particles under his belt, Stephen Wolfram believes he’s close to discovering how the universe works—or, at least, the fundamental law of physics that makes all of our other laws of physics tick. So the 60-year-old computer scientist, businessman, and physicist has launched “The Wolfram Physics Project” to crowdsource that work with some of the best minds in the world.

Talk being ahead of the curve;

Event 201 was a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic. 15 global business, government, and public health leaders were players in the simulation exercise that highlighted unresolved real-world policy and economic issues that could be solved with sufficient political will, financial investment, and attention now and in the future.

The exercise consisted of pre-recorded news broadcasts, live “staff” briefings, and moderated discussions on specific topics. These issues were carefully designed in a compelling narrative that educated the participants and the audience.

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Google plans to add a Zoom-like gallery view to its business- and education-focused Meet videoconferencing service and let users start calls and join meetings right from Gmail, Google’s GM and VP of G Suite Javier Soltero told Reuters in an interview. The additions come amid huge growth for Meet as families, students, and workers use the service while at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The upcoming gallery view will let users display up to 16 meeting participants in one frame, according to Reuters. That functionality is coming later this month, said Soltero. Zoom’s gallery view, by contrast, lets you see the thumbnails of up to 49 people in one screen, if you have a powerful enough CPU to display them all.