Lifeboat Foundation

There is widespread agreement that the only way to safely reopen the economy is through a massive increase in testing. The US needs to test millions of people per day to effectively track and then contain the covid-19 pandemic.

This is a tall order. The country tested only around 210,000 people per day last week, and the pace is not increasing fast enough to get to millions quickly.

The urgency to do better is overwhelmingly bipartisan, with the most recent legislation adding $25 billion for testing a few days ago. Fears are growing, however, that testing might not scale in time to make a difference. As Senators Lamar Alexander and Roy Blunt wrote last week, “We have been talking with experts across the government and the private sector to find anyone who believes that current technology can produce the tens of millions of tests necessary to put this virus behind us. Unfortunately, we have yet to find anyone to do so.”

Virgin Galactic’s newest SpaceShipTwo space plane just flew freely above its New Mexico home base for the first time.

The North Korean leader made his first public appearance in 20 days as he celebrated the completion of a fertilizer factory near Pyongyang.

The investigators concluded that diffuse bilateral pulmonary inflammation observed in COVID-19 is associated with a novel pulmonary-specific vasculopathy, which is distinct from DIC, and which they’ve termed “pulmonary intravascular coagulopathy (PIC).”

“Understanding how these micro-clots are being formed within the lung is critical so that we can develop more effective treatments for our patients, particularly those in high-risk groups,” O’Donnell commented. “Further studies will be required to investigate whether different blood thinning treatments may have a role in selected high-risk patients in order to reduce the risk of clot formation.”

The authors suggest that larger, controlled studies will be needed to determine whether more intensive anticoagulation and/or targeted anti-inflammatory therapies might help reduce PIC in patients with severe COVID-19. The findings may also be relevant to growing evidence that some ethnicities are more likely to develop serious COVID-19 than others. “Given that thrombotic risk is significantly impacted by race, coupled with the accumulating evidence that coagulopathy is important in COVID-19 pathogenesis, our findings raise the intriguing possibility that pulmonary vasculopathy may contribute to the unexplained differences that are beginning to emerge highlighting racial susceptibility to COVID-19 mortality,” they concluded.

With the trillions of antibodies the human body can make, finding the antibody with the right combination of potency against a target and ease of manufacturing is, at best, an arduous, time-intensive endeavor for drug developers. AbCellera Biologics Inc. has developed a way to dramatically speed that process.

It is using its proprietary AI system to empower the search. It is mining the diversity of antibodies made by the immune system to find the relatively few that are optimized by nature to be well-suited for drug development. “A human makes trillions of different antibodies, but only a small set binds to the target of interest. Of those, only a few can be developed as drugs,” Carl Hansen, Ph.D., CEO of AbCellera, explained.

Hansen sees AbCellera as a “discovery and innovation shop. We identify the properties of antibodies that make them easy to manufacture and potent.”

Education Saturday with Space Time.

It’s not surprising that the profound weirdness of the quantum world has inspired some outlandish explanations – nor that these have strayed into the realm of what we might call mysticism. One particularly pervasive notion is the idea that consciousness can directly influence quantum systems – and so influence reality. Today we’re going to see where this idea comes from, and whether quantum theory really supports it.

Continue reading “Does Consciousness Influence Quantum Mechanics?” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBvzlR-2AmU&feature=youtu.be

I just watched an interesting series of videos on YouTube that I’d like to recommend. It is an introductory level series of very short videos on the topic of transhumanism. They are in French with subtitles. Guillaume Loublier created these to spread the word of Transhumanism throughout France. There are four videos, and if you start with the first one, then they all play in sequence automatically.

Watch them and let Guillaume know what you think of his work.

Continue reading “I am a progress lover 1/10” »

There’s been a lot of talk about quantum computers being able to solve far more complex problems than conventional supercomputers. The authors of a new paper say they’re on the pat h to showing an optical computer c an do so, too.

The idea of using light to carry out computing has a long pedigree, and it has gained traction in recent years with the advent of silicon photonics, which makes it possible to build optical circuits using the same underlying technology used for electronics. The technology s hows particular promise for accelerating deep learning, and is being actively pursued by Intel and a number of startups.

Now Chinese researchers have put a photonic chip t o work tackling a fiendishly complex computer science challenge called the s ubset sum problem in a paper in Science Advances. It ha s some potential applications in cryptography and resource allocation, but primarily it’s used as a benchmark to test the limits of computing.

As the holder of more than 270 patents in 27 countries—including 112 in the US alone—Tesla rightfully earned his place in history, but not every invention of Tesla made it to production. With that in mind, we combed through the records and found 7 of Tesla’s most substantial inventions that never got built.

To find out: https://bit.ly/2y7SpuA 🚀.