Lifeboat Foundation

Bodies of coronavirus victims have been seen lying in the streets of the Ecuadorian capital amid warnings the pandemic is yet to peak across Latin America.

Forensics experts were seen attending to the corpse of a 65-year-old man suspected of contracting COVID-19 in Quito on Tuesday. Funeral home workers later arrived to load him into a coffin and drive him away.

Continue reading “Bodies of Covid-19 victims lie in the streets of Ecuadorian city” »

‘I still can’t believe what I’m seeing.’ One couple’s apartment overlooks the street where a morgue was erected.

#MayTheFourthBeWithYou!

Perhaps they have what it takes to face the First Order, but do Kelly Marie Tran and Naomi Ackie have what it takes to train like astronauts?

The Star Wars duo spent the day at Johnson Space Center training like astronauts and learning about NASA’s plans to explore the Moon with the new #Artemis program, which includes landing the first woman and next man on the lunar surface by 2024. Follow Tran and Ackie – used to traveling through galaxies far, far away – through their training with NASA Astronauts Megan McArthur and Jessica Watkins!

Surveying neighborhoods directly may give a more accurate view than mail-in tests and other methods, researchers say.

“Cannabis extracts are showing potential in making people more resistant to the novel coronavirus, says an Alberta researcher leading a study.

After sifting through 400 cannabis strains, researchers at the University of Lethbridge are concentrating on about a dozen that show promising results in ensuring less fertile ground for the potentially lethal virus to take root, said biological scientist Dr. Igor Kovalchuk.”

But the absence of clinical trials remains a barrier, and funding from an increasingly cash-strapped cannabis industry isn’t there to fuel that, said Kovalchuk.

Continue reading “Cannabis shows promise blocking coronavirus infection: Alberta researcher” »

A new oversight board will govern Facebook content in an attempt to decentralize its policing of user posts. But is it just cover for further censorship?

Researchers at ARCNL and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam have developed a compact setup for fast, super-resolution microscopy through an ultrathin fiber. Using smart signal processing, they beat the theoretical limits of resolution and speed. Because the method does not require any special fluorescent labelling, it is promising for both medical applications and characterization of 3D structures in nanolithography. On May 7th, the results were published in Light: Science & Applications, a scientific journal in the Nature family.

“Imaging at the nanoscale is limited by the wavelength of the light that is used. There are ways to overcome this diffraction limit, but they typically require large microscopes and difficult processing procedures,” says Lyuba Amitonova. “These systems are unsuitable for imaging in deep layers of biological tissue or in other hard-to-reach places.”

Amitonova recently started a research group on Nanoscale Imaging and Metrology at ARCNL. She is also connected part-time to VU Amsterdam where she works on ultrathin fibers for endomicroscopy in the group of Johannes de Boer. Amitonova and de Boer have developed a way to overcome the diffraction limit in small systems to enable deep-tissue imaging with super-resolution.

The next-generation networks will provide major strides in latency, speed and localized access to AI.

The researchers linked two copies of a special kind of antibody produced by llamas to create a new antibody that binds tightly to a key protein on the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This protein, called the spike protein, allows the virus to break into host cells. Initial tests indicate that the antibody blocks viruses that display this spike protein from infecting cells in culture.

“This is one of the first antibodies known to neutralize SARS-CoV-2,” said Jason McLellan, associate professor of molecular biosciences at UT Austin and co-senior author, referring to the virus that causes COVID-19.

The team is now preparing to conduct preclinical studies in animals such as hamsters or nonhuman primates, with the hopes of next testing in humans. The goal is to develop a treatment that would help people soon after infection with the virus.