An Unproven Theorem

India's COVID-19 emergency The Lancet Published: May 08, 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)01052-7 The scenes of suffering in India are hard to comprehend. As of May 4, more than 20·2 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported, with a rolling average of 378 000 cases a day, together with more than 222 000 deaths, which experts believe are likely to be substantial underestimates. Hospitals are overwhelmed, and health workers are exhausted and becoming infected. Social media is full of desperate people (doctors and the public) seeking medical oxygen, hospital beds, and other necessities. Yet before the second wave of cases of COVID-19 began to mount in early March, Indian Minister of Health  Harsh Vardhan declared  that India was in the “endgame” of the epidemic. The impression from the government was that India had beaten COVID-19 after several months of low case counts, despite  repeated warnings of the dangers of a second wave  and the emergence of n...

NEWS    23 JANUARY 2021     UPDATE  23 JANUARY 2021 Why did the world’s pandemic warning system fail when COVID hit? Nearly one year ago, the World Health Organization sounded the alarm about the coronavirus, but was ignored. Amy Maxmen       PDF version WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is reviewing how the world responded to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic during an executive board meeting this week. Credit: Fabrice Coffrini/Reuters The World Health Organization (WHO) sounded its highest alarm on 30 January 2020 — a declaration called a ‘public health emergency of international concern’, or PHEIC, signalling that a pandemic might be imminent. Few countries heeded the WHO’s call for testing, tracing and social distancing to curb the coronavirus. By mid-March, it had spread around the world. Now, health officials and researchers are evaluating why the organization’s warning system failed and how to overhaul it. Many say the o...

Original content from www.biotecnika.org https://www.biotecnika.org/2018/01/miracles-breakthroughs-bio-science-year-review-15-top-takes-2017/ Miracle Cancer Drug Given Green Signal A global threat, the word “Cancer” now instils more fear than death itself. In a major milestone, the TGA, Australia, approved Venetoclax early last year; a drug that melts off cancer cells for the treatment of patients with stage-four leukaemia. The promising drug has over 80% of patients who received the treatment responding terrifically well with 20% in full remission. NASA Names Alien Bacteria After Abdul Kalam A new bacterium, entirely unknown to human species was discovered on the International Space Station (ISS) and was named Solibacillus kalamii to honour the late president. The tiny hitchhiker was found on the ISS’s HEPA filter, remaining onboard for about 40 months before being discovered by senior research scientist Kasthuri Venkateswaran. Hong Kong Start-up Claims World’...

Gravitational wave detection wins physics Nobel Davide Castelvecchi 03 October 2017  (https://www.nature.com/news/gravitational-wave-detection-wins-physics-nobel-1.22737?WT.ec_id=NEWSDAILY-20171003)  Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne share the 2017 prize for their work at LIGO to detect ripples in space-time. Three physicists who had leading roles in the first direct detection of gravitational waves have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Rainer Weiss, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and Barry Barish and Kip Thorne, both at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, share the 9 million Swedish krona (US$1.1-million) award for their work at the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). In September 2015, LIGO picked up the deformations in space-time caused by the collision of two distant black holes. That discovery, which was  announced in February 2016 , opened up a new...

Nobel In Medicine Awarded To 3 Scientists For Work On Circadian Rhythm Three American researchers have been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in medicine “for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm”, or the biological clock. The 9 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million) award will shared by Jeffrey Hall of the University of Maine, Michael Rosbash of Brandeis University in Massachusetts and Michael Young of Rockefeller University in New York. Their work helped illuminate one of the central mysteries of human life: why we need sleep, and how it happens. They were given their award for understanding the mysteries of how life tracks time and changes itself according to the movement of the sun. The researchers had isolated a gene in fruit flies that controls the daily biological rhythm. They were able to show how the gene encodes a protein that builds up in cells at night, but then degrades during the day. The researchers also identified other prot...

RESEARCHERS FROM HUMAN LONGEVITY, INC. USE WHOLE GENOME SEQUENCE DATA AND MACHINE LEARNING TO IDENTIFY INDIVIDUALS THROUGH FACE AND OTHER PHYSICAL TRAIT PREDICTION (SAN DIEGO, CA)—September 5, 2017—Researchers from Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI) have published a study in which individual faces and other physical traits were predicted using whole genome sequencing data and machine learning. This work, from lead author Christoph Lippert, Ph.D. and senior author J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., was published in the journal  Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences  (PNAS). The authors believe that, while the study offers novel approaches for forensics, the work has serious implications for data privacy, deidentification and adequately informed consent. The team concludes that much more public deliberation is needed as more and more genomes are generated and placed in public databases. For the IRB approved study, 1,061 ethnically diverse people ranging in age from 18 to 82...