Lifeboat Foundation

In the video, one person is designed as the “infected” patient and is given a special black light-ready solution to rub into his hands. (The solution is invisible without a black light, so participants in the demonstration can’t see it during the simulation.) Then, everyone in the experiment does what people normally do at a buffet restaurant — they dish up food, eat chat, and drink. At the end of the video, a black light is turned on, and you can see the “virus” just about everywhere. It shows up on utensils, cups, food and even on some participants’ faces.

Experts say this is definitely worth paying attention to.

“This is an accurate illustration of how many commonly touched surfaces there are and how many opportunities there are for viruses to spread,” Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, tells Yahoo Life.

University of Alberta researchers are racing against the clock to test an antiviral drug that has been proven to cure a cat coronavirus and is hoped to have the same effect on people with COVID-19.

“Our lab has been working as fast as we can to get our results out,” said biochemist Joanne Lemieux. “We have not taken weekends, the days of the week have blurred. We’re all working non-stop to get results as fast as we can.”

The project is one of 11 at the U of A to receive funding from the federal government’s $52.6 million investment in COVID-19 research.

Joanne Lemieux and colleagues say the dipeptide-based protease inhibitor, GC376, and its analog, GC373, should be fast-forwarded for testing in clinical trials of COVID-19. The research is published on the preprint server bioRxiv*.

“They are strong drug candidates for the treatment of human coronavirus infections because they have already been successful in animals (cats),” writes the team. “The work here lays the framework for their use in human trials for the treatment of COVID-19.”

Conventional rockets – with their onboard fuel – are expensive and dangerous. A new “quantized inertia” concept might make rocket launches cheaper and safer. The concept has just received $1.3 million in new funding.

Tesla’s new battery could last way longer and make its vehicles far more affordable.

Quantum entanglement is a process by which microscopic objects like electrons or atoms lose their individuality to become better coordinated with each other. Entanglement is at the heart of quantum technologies that promise large advances in computing, communications and sensing, for example detecting gravitational waves.

Entangled states are famously fragile: in most cases even a tiny disturbance will undo the entanglement. For this reason, current quantum technologies take great pains to isolate the microscopic systems they work with, and typically operate at temperatures close to absolute zero. The ICFO team, in contrast, heated a collection of atoms to 450 Kelvin, millions of times hotter than most atoms used for quantum technology. Moreover, the individual atoms were anything but isolated; they collided with each other every few microseconds, and each collision set their electrons spinning in random directions.

The researchers used a laser to monitor the magnetization of this hot, chaotic gas. The magnetization is caused by the spinning electrons in the atoms, and provides a way to study the effect of the collisions and to detect entanglement. What the researchers observed was an enormous number of entangled atoms — about 100 times more than ever before observed. They also saw that the entanglement is non-local — it involves atoms that are not close to each other. Between any two entangled atoms there are thousands of other atoms, many of which are entangled with still other atoms, in a giant, hot and messy entangled state.

Over billions of years, microorganisms and plants evolved the remarkable process we know as photosynthesis. Photosynthesis converts sun energy into chemical energy, thus providing all life on Earth with food and oxygen. The cellular compartments housing the molecular machines, the chloroplasts, are probably the most important natural engines on earth. Many scientists consider artificially rebuilding and controlling the photosynthetic process the “Apollo project of our time.” It would mean the ability to produce clean energy—clean fuel, clean carbon compounds such as antibiotics, and other products simply from light and carbon dioxide.

But how to build a living, photosynthetic cell from scratch? Key to mimicking the processes of a living cell is to get its components to work together at the right time and place. At the Max Planck Society, this ambitious goal is pursued in an interdisciplinary multi-lab initiative, the MaxSynBio network. Now the Marburg research team led by director Tobias Erb has succeeded successfully created a platform for the automated construction of cell-sized photosynthetically active compartments, “artificial chloroplasts,” that are able to capture and convert the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide with light.

Scientists around the world are working on a number of vaccines and treatments for COVID-19.

AI can now be used to generate an endless stream of plausible-sounding but meaningless words. Check out to create more babble than you know what to do with.