Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: health

(From left) Expedition 65 crew members Pyotr Dubrov, Oleg Novitskiy and Mark Vande Hei, pose for a photo during Soyuz qualification exams in Moscow.

The Expedition 64 crew continued researching how microgravity affects biology aboard the International Space Station today. The orbital residents also conducted vein and eye checks and prepared for three new crew members due in early April.

NASA Flight Engineer Shannon Walker joined Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov for vein and eye scans on Thursday. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi led the effort scanning veins in the trio’s neck, clavicle and shoulder areas using the Ultrasound 2 device in the morning. In the afternoon, Noguchi examined Walker’s eyes using the orbiting lab’s optical coherence tomography gear.

Walker also assisted fellow Flight Engineer Kate Rubins of NASA setting up samples of tiny worms for viewing in a microscope. Rubins captured video of the microscopic worms wriggling around to learn how microgravity affects genetic expression and muscle function. Insights from the Micro-16 study may benefit human health on and off the Earth.

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The mayor of Oakland, California, on Tuesday announced a privately funded program that will give low-income families of color in the city $500 per month with no rules on how they can spend it.

The program is the latest experiment with a “guaranteed income,” the idea that giving low-income individuals a regular, monthly stipend helps ease the stresses of poverty and results in better health and upward economic mobility.”

Alan DeRossett.

After two years successfully testing Oakland, California now will expand its basic income to low income residents.

Only people of color in the California city are eligible to receive the basic income, which they can spend however they see fit.

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Importance Numerous prognostic models of suicide risk have been published, but few have been implemented outside of integrated managed care systems.

Objective To evaluate performance of a suicide attempt risk prediction model implemented in a vendor-supplied electronic health record to predict subsequent suicidal ideation and suicide attempt.

Design, Setting, and Participants This observational cohort study evaluated implementation of a suicide attempt prediction model in live clinical systems without alerting. The cohort comprised patients seen for any reason in adult inpatient, emergency department, and ambulatory surgery settings at an academic medical center in the mid-South from June 2019 to April 2020.

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From microwave ovens to Wi-Fi connections, the radio waves that permeate the environment are not just signals of energy consumed but are also sources of energy themselves. An international team of researchers, led by Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, has developed a way to harvest energy from radio waves to power wearable devices.

The researchers recently published their method in Materials Today Physics.

According to Cheng, current energy sources for wearable health-monitoring devices have their place in powering sensor devices, but each has its setbacks. Solar power, for example, can only harvest energy when exposed to the sun. A self-powered triboelectric can only harvest energy when the body is in motion.

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ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WHEC) — Monroe County Public Health Commissioner Dr. Michael Mendoza Tuesday announced new COVID-19 variants have been found in Monroe County.

Mendoza announced that two cases of the UK variant and a small sample of the California variant were found in Monroe County in some older cases from February.

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Wiesendanger points out that unlike SARS and MERS, no intermediate host between bats and humans has been found more than a year since the start of the pandemic. Thus far, there is no evidence for the zoonotic theory to explain the outbreak.

Indeed, during the joint China-WHO report issued on Feb. 9, Liang Wannian, head of the Chinese National Health Commission’s Expert Panel of COVID-19 Response, stated that 50000 samples of wild animals from 300 different species (including bats) as well as 11000 farm animals in 31 Chinese provinces — taken between November 2019 and March 2020 — had all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19.

The researcher claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is “astonishingly effective” at binding to human receptor cells (hACE2). He said this is due to its special hACE2 binding domains paired with the furin cleavage sites of the virus’ telltale spike protein.

He stated that this is the first time a coronavirus has exhibited both characteristics and that it points to a “non-natural origin.” Within the betacoronaviruses of sarbecovirus lineage B, the polybasic furin cleavage site is unique to SARS-CoV-2, according to News Medical Life Sciences.

Wiesendanger noted that there were no bats sold at the infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the first known superspreader event began. Liang has stated that no animals or “animal products” had tested positive for the virus there and that individuals who contracted COVID early on had not visited the market.”

Year-long study of pandemic’s origin concludes it started with ‘laboratory accident’ in Wuhan.

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It has long been understood that a parent’s DNA is the principal determinant of health and disease in offspring. Yet inheritance via DNA is only part of the story; a father’s lifestyle such as diet, being overweight and stress levels have been linked to health consequences for his offspring. This occurs through the epigenome—heritable biochemical marks associated with the DNA and proteins that bind it. But how the information is transmitted at fertilization along with the exact mechanisms and molecules in sperm that are involved in this process has been unclear until now.

A new study from McGill, published recently in Developmental Cell, has made a significant advance in the field by identifying how is transmitted by non-DNA molecules in the sperm. It is a discovery that advances scientific understanding of the heredity of paternal life experiences and potentially opens new avenues for studying disease transmission and prevention.

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Sherpa, a startup from Bilbao, Spain that was an early mover in building a voice-based digital assistant and predictive search for Spanish-speaking audiences, has raised some more funding to double down on a newer focus for the startup: building out privacy-first AI services for enterprise customers.

The company has closed $8.5 million, funding that Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, Sherpa’s founder and CEO, said it will be using to continue building out a privacy-focused machine learning platform based on a federated learning model alongside its existing conversational AI and search services. Early users of the service have included the Spanish public health services, which were using the platform to analyse information about COVID-19 cases to predict demand and capacity in emergency rooms around the country.

The funding is coming from Marcelo Gigliani, a managing partner at Apax Digital; Alex Cruz, the chairman of British Airways; and Spanish investment firms Mundi Ventures and Ekarpen. The funding is an extension to the $15 million Sherpa has already raised in a Series A. From what I understand, Sherpa is currently also raising a larger Series B.

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Some experts have chimed in that tempering social distancing recommendations could be an important step to getting children back into classrooms. Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, suggested in a tweet that the C.D.C. guidance may be changing, and that is “good. Because 6 ft doesn’t protect teachers. But it does keep kids out of school.”

“Want to open schools safely? Masks. Ventilation. Testing. Vaccinating teachers/staff. That’s the list,” Dr. Jha tweeted.

The new study, published March 10, compared the incidence rates of coronavirus cases among students and staff in Massachusetts school districts that required at least six feet of separation with those that required only three feet of distance, and found no statistically significant differences in infection rates among staff members or students.

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The Strait of Gibraltar is featured in this false-color image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on October 282020. Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel missions (2020), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The Strait of Gibraltar connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean and separates southernmost Spain from northernmost Africa. The channel is 58 km long and narrows to 13 km in width between Point Marroquí (Spain) and Point Cires (Morocco). Ferries and vessels can be seen traveling across the strait and crossing between the two continents.

This false-color image, captured on October 282020, was processed in a way that included the near-infrared channel. This type of band combination from Copernicus Sentinel-2 is most commonly used to assess plant density and health, as plants reflect near-infrared and green light, while absorbing red. Since they reflect more near-infrared than green, dense, plant-covered land appears in bright red.

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