It's all part of a quest to discover the best ways to send messages through human bodies instructing those bodies to perform in whatever way they are ordered to do.
Just when you thought you'd heard the last of the Covid vaccines — those mRNA vaccines you've come to "know and love" as MIT so endearingly puts it — there's a new version in town.

Welcome to the next generation of self-amplifying Covid vaccines, also known as replicons.

No, they aren't "replicants" like in my favorite movie, Blade Runner (the original from 1982).

Although, in a way, it is disturbingly like that. Except they're replicating inside our bodies. Like a photocopy machine. Yeah, inside our bodies.

Whatever will they think of next?

Japan just announced it's become the first country in the world to approve the new vaccine, called LUNAR-COV19.

FYI, I found it interesting that they named it LUNAR and introduced it at the same time as Japan's LUNAR landing touched down on the Moon just days ago.

Talk about synchronicity — or good marketing.

The collaborations on these vaccines get a little complicated but to break it down, Meiji Seika Pharma is the company that obtained exclusive rights to distribute Kostaive (LUNAR) from CSL Seqirus. They are collaborating with ARCALIS INC. to establish integrated mRNA vaccine manufacturing capabilities from drug substance to drug product.

Now, I know that's a boring read. But I include the information to emphasize a point. If I were to list all the companies involved in this type of research, production and manufacture, the list would be almost endless — and even more endlessly boring.

That list would also be extremely incestuous. For example, Bill Gates invests billions of dollars in multiple rival companies, in anticipation that a few will stick. In this race, only the most powerful can enter and the stakes are high. Astronomical amounts of money, beyond what we can imagine, are invested into these technologies. Not to cure us of anything — how absurd! But to make even more astronomical amounts of money for the men behind the technology.

None of these powerful players — I mean none of them — is going to let these vaccines fail. Even if they do fail — they won't. Do you get what I'm saying? This is as obvious as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Those who dare dispute the wonder and magic of these vaccines are often discredited or worse.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's continue.

President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russian scientists were close to creating vaccines for cancer that could soon be available to patients.

Putin said in televised comments that "we have come very close to the creation of so-called cancer vaccines and immunomodulatory drugs of a new generation".

"I hope that soon they will be effectively used as methods of individual therapy," he added, speaking at a Moscow forum on future technologies.

A passenger on board a Lufthansa flight from Thailand to Germany died Thursday, after his fellow travelers watched in horror as blood gushed out of his mouth and nose.

The unidentified 63-year-old German man was seen boarding the Airbus A380 in Bangkok shortly before midnight visibly sick, with "cold sweats" and "breathing much too quickly," Karin Missfelder recounted to Swiss German outlet Blick.

At first, she said, his wife claimed they had to rush to catch the flight — which is why he wasn't feeling well.

Howl about that?

Mutant wolves that roam the human-free Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have developed cancer-resilient genomes that could be key to helping humans fight the deadly disease, according to a study.

The wild animals have managed to adapt and survive the high levels of radiation that have plagued the area after a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded in 1986, becoming the world's worst nuclear accident.

It was the first day of spring break in 1992 in Phoenix, and 12-year-old Heather Smith was excited for her family's upcoming ski trip.

But before Smith and her family had even packed their snow pants, she realized she didn't feel good. "I woke up feeling just a little bit nauseous, and I wasn't sure why. Throughout the course of the day, I started to feel worse and worse and started to develop pain in the abdomen," she says.

By about midafternoon, her father took her to urgent care. She ended up getting emergency surgery to have her appendix out.

Smith still has a small scar from the appendectomy. And after the surgery, she found herself intrigued by the part of her body she had so suddenly lost. "It inspired me to wonder: Why do we have this weird little organ in the first place? What does it do? Why does it get inflamed?"

Smith grew up to be a professor of anatomy at Midwestern University and editor-in-chief of a journal called The Anatomical Record. And all these decades later, Smith has made a mark in the field by studying the very organ that threw off her family's vacation plans in 1992.

She acknowledges that the appendix has a bad rap as a useless organ that can cause you pain and require emergency surgery. "But it turns out recent research shows it does have functions that can help us," she says.

NPR's Short Wave spoke to Smith about what the appendix is good for and how a future where appendicitis can be prevented or treated without emergency surgery could be on the way.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In the second week of March 2020, the Trump administration announced "15 days to flatten the curve" based on the misguided notion that shutting the economy down temporarily would reduce hospital admissions and thus lower the Covid death toll over the medium and long term. As you know, in some places the lockdowns of schools and businesses lasted for up to 18 months and destroyed the U.S. economy and hundreds of thousands of small businesses in the process.

At the time, I was battling against SB163 in Colorado — a bill that required parents to be tracked in a Government database and go through an online re-education program if they wanted their children to attend public school but declined any childhood vaccines. But the legislature suddenly shut down with no reopen date in sight.

So I pivoted to working on Covid and the Covid lockdowns. I recalled that there is an extensive literature on "social determinants of health" and "deaths of despair" going back to the 1970s. The idea is relatively straightforward — if the unemployment rate goes up, lots of bad things happen including increases in murder, domestic violence, child abuse, incarceration, mental illness, suicide and deaths from drug and alcohol poisoning.

An employee at a Pfizer branch in Kyiv has exposed a shocking clinical trial conducted by the pharmaceutical company, resulting in the tragic deaths of over 40 Ukrainian children at the time of this revelation. These trials have been marred by severe violations of medical and ethical standards, raising alarming concerns. Despite the discovery of these violations in the early stages of the trials and a distressingly high rate of hospitalizations and fatalities, Pfizer stubbornly persists in continuing these experiments.

The disturbing revelations came to light through a series of videos that surfaced in early February on the TikTok account of Anna Sakhno (@anna.sakhno), a Pfizer employee based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Anna disclosed that the usual responsibilities of the Kyiv division primarily involve drug importation and distribution within Ukraine, with no involvement in clinical trials.

Authorities in Washington state confirmed an outbreak of a deadly fungal infection that has been on the rise across the United States in recent years.

Officials in King County, Washington, said in a statement on Tuesday that an outbreak involving three patients infected by Candida auris, or C. auris, was reported at Kindred Hospital in Seattle beginning in mid-January. Another case was detected on Jan. 26 at a nursing home in nearby Snohomish County, officials said.

"These patients had previously tested negative for C. auris when they were first admitted," it said. "This is the first known outbreak of C. auris in Washington state."

All COVID-19 variants, including omicron, are resistant to vaccine-induced antibodies, meaning they are less responsive to the vaccine, as shown in a study published in the journal Vaccine. However, this resistance could be temporarily overcome with additional COVID-19 shots.

"Our data reflect the poor durability of vaccine-induced nAb (neutralizing antibody) responses," the study authors wrote.

Neutralizing antibodies are those the body makes to prevent the virus — in this case, SARS-CoV-2 — from entering and infecting cells.

A U.S. appeals court on Monday refused to dismiss a Georgia doctor's lawsuit claiming that Bayer AG's Roundup weedkiller caused cancer, the latest setback in the German company's efforts to fend off thousands of similar cases carrying potentially billions of dollars in liability.

A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Bayer's argument that federal regulators' approval of Roundup shielded the company from being sued under state law for failing to warn consumers of the product's risks. Several other appeals courts had previously reached the same conclusion in similar lawsuits.

Bayer said in a statement that it disagreed with the ruling and that it "continues to stand fully behind its Roundup products," which it maintains are safe.

The ruling comes as some investors have been pressuring the company to change its strategy on the litigation, by pursuing settlements or breaking up its business. So far, however, the company has doubled down on continuing to fight Roundup cases in court, saying it believes it can win key victories on appeal.

If the 11th Circuit had broken with those other appeals courts, it would have made it more likely for the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue. Another federal appeals court, the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit, is currently considering the issue in a separate case.