Lifeboat Foundation

The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria presents an ominous threat for humankind, with these so-called superbugs projected to kill millions of people annually by midway through the century. Scientists at the University of Exeter have developed a promising technique that could help us keep these crafty foes in check, by quickly illuminating bacteria when antibiotics have had the desired effect.

Such is the seriousness of superbug dilemma that one UK government report recently found they could kill 10 million people a year by 2050 unless some new solutions are found. These are bacteria that have evolved to become resistant to our very best drugs, and they could possibly cast the world back into the dark ages of medicine if they are simply left to do their thing.

While this resistance occurs naturally as bacteria evolve, one of the major contributing factors to its acceleration is the overuse of antibiotics. Prescribing antibiotics for humans and having them take drugs either for the wrong condition or consume more than they need, creates more opportunities for the bacteria to evolve, ramping up the overall trend.

This looks quite interesting: MMR vaccines might be beneficial against #Covid19

PDF | Published epidemiological data suggests a correlation between patients who receive measles-rubella containing vaccines such as the commonly… | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate.

Continue reading “MMR Vaccine Appears to Confer Strong Protection from COVID-19: Few Deaths from SARS-CoV-2 in Highly Vaccinated Populations” »

Even before the pandemic, public health agencies around the world were struggling to counter increasingly sophisticated efforts to turn people against vaccines. With vaccination rates against measles and other infectious diseases falling in some locations, the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019 listed “vaccine hesitancy” as one of 10 major global health threats.

To stop the pandemic, the world’s public health experts must win the coming “story war” over vaccine misinformation.

Continue reading “Just 50% of Americans plan to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Here’s how to win over the rest” »

Well this is interesting:

A Henry Ford Health System study shows the controversial anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine helps lower the death rate of COVID-19 patients, the Detroit-based health system said Thursday.

Officials with the Michigan health system said the study found the drug “significantly” decreased the death rate of patients involved in the analysis.

Continue reading “Hydroxychloroquine lowers COVID-19 death rate, Henry Ford Health study finds” »

What if your seat on the subway could fight off coronavirus? A French company has designed a new type of ‘decontaminating’ fabric, which is already equipping local metro trains.

Do the stimulus checks being sent to individuals to help in the coronavirus crisis count as a form of universal basic income? Andrew Yang thinks so. But, as WSJ’s Jason Bellini reports, others believe the intention behind UBI is misguided. Photo: Tom Brenner/Getty Images.

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Continue reading “Why the Virus Stimulus Is Renewing the Universal Basic Income Debate | WSJ” »

Thank you my hero.

Elon Musk has joined the global tech crusade now underway to revolutionize vaccine manufacturing — now aimed at delivering billions of doses of a new mRNA vaccine to fight Covid-19. And he’s cutting right to the front.

In a late-night tweet Wednesday, the Tesla chief announced:

Continue reading “Tesla chief Elon Musk teams up with Covid-19 player CureVac to build ‘RNA microfactories’” »

Vitaliy Karimov/Shutterstock

Tesla, the electric car company founded and run by Elon Musk, is building mobile molecular printers to assist Germany’s CureVac in manufacturing its experimental COVID-19 vaccine. Musk tweeted the information on Wednesday, July 1.

The “printers” are portable, automated messenger RNA (mRNA) production units, which Musk referred to as “RNA microfactories.”

Continue reading “Tesla to Build Mobile RNA Microfactories for CureVac’s COVID-19 Vaccine” »

Lurking just beneath the surface of just about every common nursery rhyme is a complex record of times long gone. For example, the “crooked man” who “laid a crooked sixpence upon a crooked style” was none other than the great 17th-century Scot General Sir Alexander Leslie. The crooked stile was the uneasy border between Scotland and England established by the controversial covenant he signed. Quite similarly, many enigmatic structures that permanently persist or otherwise transiently appear and resorb in the development of the nervous systems of many creatures also encode a rich evolutionary past.

One such functioning relic is Reissner’s fiber, a glycoprotein sheet secreted by the subcommissural organ (SCO) that inexorably treadmills down the central canal of the spinal cord. Although the SCO was one of the first structures of the mammalian brain to differentiate, in humans, it begins regressing around age three or four and typically becomes vestigial by adulthood. The main component of Reissner’s fiber is a giant 5000-amino-acid vertebrate molecule called SCO-spondin. This protein contains axonal pathfinding domains critical to development of the posterior commissure, a transhemispheric highway that bears axons controlling the pupillary light reflex.

The other product of the SCO is a thyroid-hormone-transporting protein called transthyretin. Much like all the organified metals fixed by life, iodine has a unique story to tell in the evolution of the body plan. Recently, an intriguing connection between Reissner’s fiber and development of the spine that houses it has been discovered in the model organism, zebrafish. These fish, as recently observed for the serotonergic control of neurogenesis, have proven to be an exemplary model for studying all things neural. In the latest issue of Current Biology, author Nathalie Jurisch-Yaksi reviews a remarkable confluence of ideas that establish an indisputable role for Reissner’s membrane building a straight and strong spine.