Science & TechnologyS


Cell Phone

Swiss soldiers fight COVID-19 armed with Bluetooth smartphone tracing app

Robin Millard
Yahoo! News
Sun, 03 May 2020 19:13 UTC
Swiss solder installing COVID app
© AFP/Fabrice CoffriniSwiss soldiers install the coronavirus tracing app on their smartphones.
Swiss army conscripts are taking the fight to the coronavirus pandemic by field-testing a Bluetooth-based smartphone app aimed at stopping a resurgence of COVID-19.

The rapidly-created app traces people who have inadvertently crossed paths with someone infected with the virus.

It uses wireless technology with each phone registering the others it has come into close proximity with for a sustained period of time.

For the field test, the infantry recruits went through a normal day: physical training, theoretical study and shooting at targets 300 metres away.

"What we did before was lab tests. Now we're gathering data on how this app performs in real life," Simon Rosch, a software engineer with smartphone app developers Ubique, told AFP.
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Bullseye

DARPA: US 'germ warfare research' to create Covid-19 test; identify carriers before they are infectious

Giles Tremlett
The Guardian
Fri, 01 May 2020 11:00 UTC
Sars CoV-2
© Guardian/AlamyTransmission electron microscope image shows Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.
Scientists working for the US military have designed a new Covid-19 test that could potentially identify carriers before they become infectious and spread the disease, the Guardian has learned.

In what could be a significant breakthrough, project coordinators hope the blood-based test will be able to detect the virus's presence as early as 24 hours after infection - before people show symptoms and several days before a carrier is considered capable of spreading it to other people. That is also around four days before current tests can detect the virus.

The test has emerged from a project set up by the US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aimed at rapid diagnosis of germ or chemical warfare poisoning. It was hurriedly repurposed when the pandemic broke out and the new test is expected to be put forward for emergency use approval (EUA) by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) within a week.

Comment: In addition to the new diagnostic test, DARPA scientists are also working toward antibody treatments for the deadly pathogen.

For an organ-to-organ rundown on proposed symptoms related to or affected by Covid-19, see also: How does coronavirus kill? Tracing the ferocious rampage through the body, brain to toes

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Microscope 2

How does coronavirus kill? Tracing the ferocious rampage through the body, brain to toes

Meredith Wadman, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
Sciencemag.org
Fri, 17 Apr 2020 06:45 UTC
lungs
© GEORGE WASHINGTON HOSPITAL AND SURGICAL THEATERThe coronavirus wreaked extensive damage (yellow) on the lungs of a 59-year-old man who died at George Washington University Hospital, as seen in a 3D model based on computerized tomography scans.
On rounds in a 20-bed intensive care unit one recent day, physician Joshua Denson assessed two patients with seizures, many with respiratory failure and others whose kidneys were on a dangerous downhill slide. Days earlier, his rounds had been interrupted as his team tried, and failed, to resuscitate a young woman whose heart had stopped. All shared one thing, says Denson, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Tulane University School of Medicine. "They are all COVID positive."

As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 surges past 2.2 million globally and deaths surpass 150,000, clinicians and pathologists are struggling to understand the damage wrought by the coronavirus as it tears through the body. They are realizing that although the lungs are ground zero, its reach can extend to many organs including the heart and blood vessels, kidneys, gut, and brain.
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Beaker

Paper shows that "mutational load" arguments don't refute ENCODE findings


Evolution News
Sat, 02 May 2020 20:16 UTC
DNA sculpture steel
© Jarrod Doll/FlickrWatson and Crick DNA Memorial sculpture by Charles Jencks in Clare College Memorial Court
When the ENCODE project first proposed, on the basis of direct empirical research, that 80 percent of the genome may be biochemically functional, a huge prediction of intelligent design was fulfilled. Evolutionary biologists saw the writing on the wall and were quick to fight back. Perhaps one of ENCODE's staunchest critics has been Dan Graur, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Houston. He argued in 2017 in the journal Genome, Biology and Evolution that ENCODE's empirically based conclusions could not possibly be correct because "Mutational load considerations lead to the conclusion that the functional fraction within the human genome cannot exceed 15%." What exactly is "mutational load"?

Mutational load is based upon the principal that populations of organisms can only tolerate a certain number of deleterious mutations before they reach a critical level and the population crashes. If every element of a genome is functional, then every possible mutation stands to have a non-neutral effect, and could be potentially deleterious. But if only a small portion of the genome is functional, then most mutations will happen to occur in functionally unimportant regions, and this spreads out mutations in a manner that greatly decreases the likelihood of experiencing a deleterious mutation. Thus, when your genome is filled with "junk," you can tolerate a much higher "mutational load."

Comment: More from the ENCODE project

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X

Best of the Web: Zoological clarification: No, we didn't get coronavirus from bats

Yossi Yovel, Maya Weinberg
Haaretz
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 10:58 UTC
fruitbats
© Itay Belson/Weizmann Institute of ScienceYoung fruit bats NOT the source of coronavirus
A distant relative of the coronavirus afflicting us today was found in a bat in China and that's all it took to demonize the extraordinary flying mammals.

Let's start from the punch line: Bats did not give us the latest coronavirus. Nor were its notorious cousins SARS-1 or MERS, or even the ebola virus, transmitted from bats to humans. So what did happen?

A distant relative of the current coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was isolated in a bat in China. Genetic analyses that looked for similarity between the virus in the bat and SARS-CoV-2, and factored in the theoretical pace at which the virus mutates, estimated that the two viruses parted ways between five and 50 years ago. In other words, one possibility is that about five years ago, the bat coronavirus managed to infect some other different animal - we don't know which one at this time. In that next animal, the coronavirus lived and mutated over those five years, and one day infected a human for the first time. There are other hypotheses as well.

Science doesn't yet know where the coronavirus lurked in wait for the past few years, or when it became dangerous to people, or when the first person was infected, nor do we know which animal infected that first human. The only thing science knows for sure is that the coronavirus isolated from the Chinese bat cannot have infected humans and isn't dangerous to them.

Comment: See also:

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Info

Enzyme could hold key to improved allergy treatments says new study

Jim Schnabel
Cornell Chronicle
Fri, 01 May 2020 19:48 UTC
Interleukin33 Protein
© Weill Cornell Medicine/ProvidedThe protein interleukin-33 (in green) in the cell nucleus (blue) of stromal cells (red) of mucosal tissue that is embedded in visceral adipose tissue (large octagonal purple cells).
A class of immune cells push themselves into an inflammatory state by producing large quantities of a serotonin-making enzyme, according to a study in mice led by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine.

The study, published March 10 in Immunity, found that the inflammatory and infection-fighting abilities of the cells, called type 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s), are much impaired without the enzyme. The finding suggests possibilities for new treatments targeting ILC2s, which have been linked to asthma and other allergic disorders, to suppress their activation in inflammatory disorders.

The work also hints at what could be a major mechanism of "cross-talk" between the nervous system, which uses serotonin as a signaling molecule or neurotransmitter, and the immune system.

"There's a lot more to do in terms of understanding the biology of these innate lymphoid cells, but it's an exciting area that offers us potential new approaches to therapeutic intervention," said study senior author Dr. David Artis, director of the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease and the Michael Kors Professor of Immunology in the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Innate lymphoid cells are a recently discovered family of white blood cells that reside in the skin, airways and other barrier tissues of the body. They appear to have important roles as first responders against environmental pathogens, but scientists also recognize that ILCs may hold the keys to understanding common inflammatory and autoimmune conditions such as asthma and inflammatory bowel disease.
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Question

Tiny Hero shrews have the most extreme spine in nature — for no discernable reason

Jason Bittel
National Geographic
Sat, 02 May 2020 17:13 UTC
hero shrew
© Bill Stanley, Field MuseumDiscovered in 2013, Scutisorex thori is one of two known species of hero shrew. It's named after Thor, the brawny god of strength in Norse mythology.
The tiny African mammals have an interlocking and highly flexible spine, new x-rays reveal — but they only deepen the intrigue.

When the Mangbetu people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo introduced Western scientists to a smoky-gray, rat-size animal, they told tales of how a grown man could stand on the mammal's back without hurting it.

That was back in 1910, and since then, studies of the animal in question — which came to be called the hero shrew — have cast light on what may account for such lore. (Another species of hero shrew was discovered, also in DRC, in 2013.)

In 2019, scientists led by Stephanie Smith, a mammologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, Illinois, took sophisticated x-rays of hero shrews. The scans showed that these little creatures have a spine unlike any other animal on Earth.
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Radar

Hundreds of towering hydrothermal chimneys discovered on seafloor off Washington

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Fri, 01 May 2020 12:00 UTC
hydrothermal vent washington
© MBARIAn autonomous diving robot captured the vents in unprecedented detail.
In the dark ocean depths off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, a magical fairyland of towering spires and hydrothermal chimneys sprout from the seafloor, a stunning new underwater map reveals.

These towers belch superheated liquid warmed by magma deep inside Earth.

The field of hydrothermal chimneys stretches along the ocean bottom on the Juan de Fuca Ridge to the northwest of coastal Washington state, in an area known as the Endeavor Segment.

Research on the Endeavor vents began in the 1980s, and scientists had previously identified 47 chimneys in five major vent fields. But recent expeditions, using an autonomous underwater vehicle operated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) revealed more than 500 chimneys in a zone about 9 miles (14 kilometers) long and 1 mile (2 km) wide.

Comment: See also:

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Health

Best of the Web: Big Pharma beware: Dr. Luc Montagnier shines new light on COVID-19 and the future of medicine

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 00:01 UTC
dr luc montagnier
This April 16th, Dr. Luc Montagnier became a household name around the world. This occurred as the controversial virologist decided to publicly state his support for the theory that Covid-19 is indeed a laboratory-generated creation and not a naturally occurring effect of viral evolution.

Referring to a study published at the Kusama School of Biology in New Dehli on January 31st, Montagnier (the 2008 Nobel Prize winner for his 1983 discovery of the HIV virus) made the point that the specific occurrence of HIV RNA viral segments spliced surgically within the COVID-19 genome could not have originated naturally and he described it in the following words:

"We have carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus. We weren't the first, a group of Indian researchers tried to publish a study showing that the complete genome of this virus that has within the sequences of another virus: that of HIV."

Comment: It is incredibly frustrating that Montagnier, like Beneviste before him, has been so maligned and smeared for his honest and humble scientific inquiries. The old guard will tightly protect their interests at all costs and so medicine will remain in the dark ages for the foreseeable future. There is little doubt that our ancestors will owe a great debt to these pioneers, if the truth is ever allowed to fluorish.

See also:

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Seismograph

Reflected tsunamis and space weather


Space Weather
Sat, 02 May 2020 02:18 UTC
Ionospheric disturbances over Japan on March 11, 2011.
Ionospheric disturbances over Japan on March 11, 2011.
When the Earth trembles, even the edge of space moves. Researchers have known for decades that earthquakes and tsunamis send waves of air pressure to the very top of Earth's atmosphere. Up there, in the ionosphere, the waves scramble GPS signals and interfere with radio communications much like solar flares do. Earthquakes, it turns out, can mimic space weather.

A new paper published in the research journal Space Weather shows that earthquakes and tsunamis may, in fact, affect the ionosphere much more than previously thought.

"On 11 March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred near the east coast of Honshu, Japan, unleashing a savage tsunami as well as unprecedented ripples at the space‐atmosphere interaction region," report the authors, led by Min-Yang Chou of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, CO.

Using satellites and ground-based GPS receivers, Chou and colleagues took a close look at what happened to the ionosphere over Japan in the aftermath of the earthquake. As expected, it was disturbed. Surprisingly, though, the ionospheric disturbances didn't peter out after the initial quake and tsunami; they kept going for many more hours.

The reason: Reflected tsunamis.

Comment: Massive Japan Earthquake Altered Earth's Gravity

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