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$15 drug gets COVID patients off oxygen support in under week – study:
Fourteen out of 15 severe COVID-19 patients who were treated in an investigator-initiated interventional open-label clinical study of the drug TriCor (fenofibrate)[*] didn't require oxygen support within a week of treatment and were released from the hospital, according to the results of a new Hebrew University of Jerusalem study.
Fenofibrate is an FDA-approved oral medication. The results were published on Researchsquare.com and are currently under peer review.
Specifically, the team that was led by HU's Prof. Yaakov Nahmias carried out the study at Israel's Barzilai Medical Center in coordination with the hospital's head of the Infectious Disease Unit, Prof. Shlomo Maayan, and with support from Abbott Laboratories.
[...] The 15 treated patients all had pneumonia and required oxygen support. They were also older with multiple comorbidities, ranging from diabetes and obesity to high blood pressure.
"The results were dramatic," Nahmias told The Jerusalem Post. "Progressive inflammation markers, which are the hallmark of deteriorative COVID-19, dropped within 48 hours of treatment. Moreover, 14 of the 15 severe patients didn't require oxygen support within a week of treatment." The 15th patient was off oxygen within 10 days.
When looking at the data on other similar severe patients, less than 30% of them on average are removed from oxygen support within a week. In other words, fenofibrate could dramatically shorten the treatment time for severe COVID patients.
"We know these kinds of patients deteriorate really fast, develop a cytokine storm in five to seven days and that it can take weeks to treat them and for them to get better," Nahmias said. "We gave these patients fenofibrate and the study shows inflammation dropped incredibly fast. They did not seem to develop a cytokine storm[**] at all."
Cytokine storms are aggressive inflammatory responses to illness.
[*] Fenofibrate entries on MedlinePlus and Wikipedia.
[**] Cytokine storm on Wikipedia.
Journal Reference:
Yaakov Nahmias, Avner Ehrlich, Konstantinos Ioannidis, et al. Metabolic Regulation of SARS-CoV-2 Infection, (DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-770724/v1)
Tropical Storm Ida swirled toward a strike on Cuba on Friday as a rapidly intensifying storm that could speed across warm Gulf waters and slam into Louisiana as a Category 3 hurricane on Sunday, the National Hurricane Center warned.
[...] An even greater danger will then begin over the Gulf, where forecasts were aligned in predicting Ida will strengthen very quickly into a major hurricane, reaching 120 mph (193 kph) before landfall in the Mississippi River delta late Sunday, the hurricane center said.
If that forecast holds true, Ida would hit 16 years to the day since Hurricane Katrina landed as a Category 3 storm with 125 mph (201 kph) winds near the riverside community of Buras in Plaquemines Parish, just down the Mississippi from New Orleans. Buras and New Orleans are among the places that show the highest probabilities for getting hit with hurricane-force winds from Ida, the national hurricane center said.
[...] A hurricane watch for New Orleans and an emergency declaration for the state of Louisiana were declared. Category 3 hurricanes are capable of causing devastating damage.
"Unfortunately, all of Louisiana's coastline is currently in the forecast cone for Tropical Storm Ida, which is strengthening and could come ashore in Louisiana as a major hurricane as Gulf conditions are conducive for rapid intensification," said Gov. John Bel Edwards.
"By Saturday evening, everyone should be in the location where they intend to ride out the storm," the governor added.
You can follow the storm's progress via the National Hurricane Center's forecasts for Ida and the National Weather Service forecasts for New Orleans.
You often hear people say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I bring this up because of an interesting—if infuriating—thread I read this morning about Texas' plan to widen I-35 as it cuts through the heart of Austin.
Unsurprisingly, the state wants to build more lanes, which it thinks will ease congestion. At some points, this could leave I-35 as much as 20 lanes wide; this will require bulldozing dozens of businesses along the way. An alternative that would have buried 12 lanes of the highway in two levels of underground tunnels was apparently considered too costly.
But it would be wrong to single out this 8-mile proposal as an outlier.
[...] The infuriating bit is that the evidence is pretty clear: these are deeply misguided policies. While it seems intuitive that the solution to three lanes of gridlock is to spread the same number of cars over four lanes, it fails because of a phenomenon called induced demand.
Reducing traffic might make sense if the only variable were the number of road lanes. But it isn't—as Ray Kinsella was told in Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come." Except this time, "they" refers to more cars. When people know a particular route is congested, some of them will choose not to drive. But once you tell everyone that you've added more lanes to that road, that latent demand has an outlet—at which point the traffic jams return, but now with even more cars in them.
As climate change continues to do more damage to our planet, scientists are working to find more efficient and cleaner ways to power the earth. One appealing alternative to common petrochemical processes that generate significant greenhouse gases and other waste products could come from biological systems.
Recent work from Northwestern Engineering's Michael Jewett and researchers from the University of Texas at Austin has led to advances in understanding of biochemical pathways and increased rates of chemical production by biological systems. The findings could bring us closer to implementing sustainable alternatives to synthesizing materials, fuels, and other oil-derived products.
The paper [...] describes the development of optimized in vitro biosynthesis (biochemical production) processes that use cell extracts from engineered strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer's yeast).
[...] Decades of metabolic studies and genetic tool development make S. cerevisiae a highly controllable framework for biochemical production. Beyond historical applications in baking and brewing, this yeast has been engineered to produce innumerable target molecules used in industrial and therapeutic applications.
However, cellular production systems have an internal tug-of-war between making more cells and making the engineered product. Jewett's group avoids these growth and viability constraints by breaking the biological machinery out of cells and using the extracted material for cell-free biochemical reactions, which enables the optimization of levers that are not easily tuned in living cells.
Journal Reference:
Blake J. Rasor, Xiunan Yi, Hunter Brown, et al. An integrated in vivo/in vitro framework to enhance cell-free biosynthesis with metabolically rewired yeast extracts [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25233-y)
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
ESA [European Space Agency] safeguards Europe's guaranteed access to space through its Future Launchers Preparatory Programme, FLPP.
FLPP oversees system studies and research activities to foster new and disruptive technologies which have the potential to reduce cost, improve performance, improve reliability, or on their ability to fulfill the specific needs of an identified service, system, demonstrator or mission.
Within FLPP, demonstrators and studies hone emerging technologies to give Europe's space transportation a valuable head-start as they begin the demanding work of turning the chosen design into reality.
Integrated demonstrators are built by combining multiple technologies into one system or subsystem so that industry can use the technology with confidence.
FLPP carries out projects in propulsion, materials and processes, reusability, structures and mechanisms, avionics and Guidance Navigation Control (GNC), and future end-to-end systems and missions.
A standardized scale of "Technology Readiness Levels" or TRL describes the level of maturity of a technology. Levels 1–2 denote basic research.
Technologies that have been demonstrated in a laboratory environment at Level 3, are further developed within FLPP and tested on the ground, in flight or in space via integrated demonstrators to raise them to TRL 6.
Once a technology has reached level 6, much of the risk linked to using a new technology in a space environment has been mitigated. It can be quickly incorporated in an operational system (TRL 9) with optimized cost and schedule.
This approach has three key benefits. It offers within a contained budget a pool of options and upgrades for quick spinoffs applicable to existing launch vehicles; it carries out high added-value research and development and it safeguards system integration and technology competencies in Europe.
Lots of details of the current development work in the full article - JR
More people are poisoning themselves with horse-deworming drug to thwart COVID:
Prior to the pandemic, ivermectin had been used for decades to prevent and treat parasitic infections in people and animals. At low concentrations, the drug interferes with specific ion channels that are found in parasitic nematode worms, but not in people or animals. The ion channel disruption in nematodes results in paralysis and keeps the worms from feeding and reproducing. As such, ivermectin is routinely used in small animals, such as dogs and cats, to prevent heartworm infections. In large livestock animals—including cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep—it's used as a deworming drug.
In humans, the FDA has approved ivermectin tablets to treat conditions caused by parasitic intestinal worms as well as topical formulations for some external parasites, like head lice. But it's critical to note that the ivermectin drugs available to people involve relatively small doses and are in formulations known to be safe for human use. The over-the-counter livestock drugs, on the other hand, are not formulated for human use and have much larger doses for the animals' much larger bodies. At higher concentrations, ivermectin begins to interfere with not just nematode ion channels, but other types of critical channels in humans and animals, like neurotransmitter channels. This can be extremely dangerous.
[...] But the petri dish data has yet to translate into any convincing clinical data that the drug is actually useful against COVID-19 in whole people. Studies in humans have been small and produced inconsistent results. Meta-analyses aimed at weeding out potential clinical benefits have struggled with faulty data, and some have been retracted.
Additionally, researchers have reason to doubt that further research will prove ivermectin is effective against COVID-19. As the National Institutes of Health notes in its clinical guidance, drug studies suggest that getting blood concentrations of ivermectin high enough to replicate the SARS-CoV-2-thwarting effects seen in petri dishes would "require administration of doses up to 100-fold higher than those approved for use in humans."
All of this hasn't stopped COVID misinformation mills on the Internet from promoting the drug—and people from buying into it. The FDA has been warning of misuse for months. But amid the surge in the delta coronavirus variant, ivermectin misuse has escalated to alarming levels.
[...] In a health alert Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that prescriptions for ivermectin have skyrocketed this month. And people unable to get a prescription for the drug have resorted to buying the over-the-counter livestock drugs, clearing out supplies in farming stores. In turn, poison control centers have seen a spike in ivermectin-related calls in recent weeks, and reports of serious illnesses from overdoses have also increased.
See, also: c|net and In The Pipeline.
Imagination Technologies to design RISC-V cores:
Now better known for its PowerVR embedded GPUs, Imagination Technologies tried to enter the CPU market by purchasing MIPS Technologies and introducing microAptiv, interAptiv, and proAptiv cores in 2012.
It did not end up well, as the company had to sell its MIPS technology a few years later, and the MIPS architecture is now barely supported. But Imagination is now working on getting back into the CPU space by designing RISC-V cores.
[...] a May 2021 report by the Financial Times claims Imagination expects to invest up to $150m over the next two years to target a fresh push into the processor design market, specifically citing the RISC-V architecture.
Also at Tom's Hardware.
See also: QEMU 6.1 Released With RISC-V Improvements, AMD Emulation Fixes
Related: Imagination Technologies Acquired for $675 Million, MIPS to be Sold Off
Wave Computing Acquires MIPS Technologies
Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU
The Science of Underground Kingdoms:
Next, Andrade's team set about analyzing what the ants were actually doing as they worked, and a few patterns emerged. For one, Andrade says, the ants tried to be efficient as possible. That meant they dug their tunnels along the inside edges of the cups, because the cup itself would act as part of their tunnels' structures, resulting in less work for them. They also dug their tunnels as straight as possible.
"That makes sense because a straight line is the shortest path between two points," Andrade says. "And with them taking advantage of the sides of the container, it shows that the ants are very efficient at what they do."
The ants also dug their tunnels as steeply as they possibly could, right up to what's known as the angle of repose. That angle represents the steepest angle that a granular material—a material made of individual grains—can be piled up before it collapses.
To understand the angle of repose, picture a child building a sand castle at the beach. If the child uses dry sand, every scoop of sand they add will slide down the sides of the pile they've already made. More sand will make the pile taller, but also wider, and it will never get steeper. On the other hand, if the child uses wet sand, they will be able to pile the sand steeply enough to build walls, and towers, and all the other things a sand castle might have. Wet sand has a higher angle of repose than dry sand, and every granular material has an angle that is unique to it. The ants, Andrade says, can tell how steep that angle is for whatever they're digging in, and they don't exceed it. That, too, makes sense, he says.
"If I'm a digger, and I'm going to survive, my digging technique is going to align with the laws of physics, otherwise my tunnels are going to collapse and I'm going to die," he says.
Citation: "Unearthing real time 3D ant tunneling mechanics," appears in the August 23 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22002/D1.1996
Science Shows Attractiveness Pays Off at Work – But There's a Trick To Level the Playing Field:
Beautiful people are more likely to get hired, receive better performance evaluations and get paid more—but it's not just because of their good looks, according to new research from the University at Buffalo School of Management.
The study [...] found that while a "beauty premium" exists across professions, it's partially because attractive people develop distinct traits as a result of how the world responds to their attractiveness. They build a greater sense of power and have more opportunities to improve nonverbal communication skills throughout their lives.
[...] "What we found was that while good looking people have a greater sense of power and are better nonverbal communicators, their less-attractive peers can level the playing field during the hiring process by adopting a powerful posture."
[...] In the second study, the researchers asked certain participants to strike a 'power pose' by standing with their feet shoulder-width apart, hands on hips, chest out and chin up during their pitch. With this technique, the less attractive people were able to match the level of nonverbal presence that their more attractive counterparts displayed naturally.
Journal Reference:
Min-Hsuan Tu, Elisabeth K. Gilbert, Joyce E. Bono. Is beauty more than skin deep? Attractiveness, power, and nonverbal presence in evaluations of hirability, Personnel Psychology (DOI: 10.1111/peps.12469)
WaPo link (may be paywalled): https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/07/30/oak-mites-bite-cicadas-dc/
Archive.is link (no paywall): https://archive.is/AEi6a
The incessant, shrieking sounds of cicadas may no longer be afflicting the Washington region, but experts say the insects may be bringing a new nuisance — oak leaf itch mites. And they bite.
"We wake up at night just scratching," said Cynthia Palmer of Arlington, speaking for herself and her 16-year-old daughter. Palmer said she has 12 to 15 bites all over her body and finds new ones daily. "It's like we have splotches of white paint all over us now that we're using the calamine [lotion]. The sores are red and swollen, so it's not pretty."
Across the region, residents are noticing these unfamiliar bites, mostly on their upper bodies, and are freaking out. They are rushing to doctors for help, pleading for a cure to the painful itching.
Gene Kritsky, the dean of behavioral and natural sciences at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, has an explanation: These microscopic mites are feeding on the billions of cicada eggs produced across the D.C. region and dropping out of trees. If you happen to be under or near these oak trees, those mites may land on you and bite.
SpaceX paused Starlink launches to give its internet satellites lasers
SpaceX hasn't launched any Starlink internet satellites since June. It turns out it's because the company has been adding "lasers" to the spacecraft.
[...] "We're flying a number of laser terminals right now in space," Shotwell said, adding that SpaceX is now working to integrate lasers into all of its Starlink satellites.
"That's why we have been struggling for six or eight weeks — we wanted the next set to have laser terminals on them," Shotwell said.
[...] With this technology, SpaceX hopes that ground stations on Earth won't be necessary with every batch of satellites as part of the constellation. Making this change could allow satellite internet coverage to reach areas where ground stations cannot be built, Shotwell explained.
The recent launch lull won't last much longer
Dan Ariely Retracts Honesty Study Based On Fake Data:
A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade later after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data.
According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they were less likely to lie. A seemingly cheap and effective method to fight fraud, it was adopted by at least one insurance company, tested by government agencies around the world, and taught to corporate executives. It made a splash among academics, who cited it in their own research more than 400 times.
The paper also bolstered the reputations of two of its authors — Max Bazerman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a psychologist and behavioral economist at Duke University — as leaders in the study of decision-making, irrationality, and unethical behavior. Ariely, a frequent TED Talk speaker and a Wall Street Journal advice columnist, cited the study in lectures and in his New York Times bestseller The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves.
A group of outside sleuths scrutinized the original paper’s underlying data and stumbled upon a bigger problem: One of its main experiments was faked “beyond any shadow of a doubt,” a team of anonymous coward researchers concluded in a post on the blog: Data Colada, on August 17, 2021.
The bigger issue, to me, is why we have not instituted "black box warnings" on all stories which report conclusions based on self reported data?
Fukushima nuclear water to be released via undersea tunnel - SRN News:
The operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant said Wednesday it plans to build an undersea tunnel so that massive amounts of treated but still radioactive water can be released into the ocean about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) away from the plant to avoid interference with local fishing.
The operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, said it hopes to start releasing the water in spring 2023. TEPCO says hundreds of storage tanks at the plant need to be removed to make room for facilities necessary for the plant’s decommissioning.
An official in charge of the water discharge project, Junichi Matsumoto, said TEPCO will construct the undersea tunnel by drilling through bedrock in the seabed near its No. 5 reactor, which survived the meltdowns at the plant, to minimize possible underground contamination or leakage of radioactive ground water into the tunnel.
Increasing amounts of radioactive water have been stored in about 1,000 tanks at the Fukushima Daiichi plant since 2011, when a massive earthquake and tsunami damaged three reactors and their cooling water became contaminated and began leaking. The plant says the tanks will reach their capacity late next year.
The government decided in April to start discharging the water, after further treatment and dilution, into the Pacific Ocean in spring 2023 under safety standards set by regulators. The idea has been fiercely opposed by fishermen, residents and neighboring countries including China and South Korea.
Silent changes to Western Digital's budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%:
Western Digital's WD Blue SN550 budget SSD is a well-reviewed popular NVMe device that has regularly shown up on various sites' "best SSD" lists since it was released at the tail-end of 2019. The drive uses a four-lane PCI Express 3.0 interface and was novel for being able to perform better than SATA SSDs for about the same amount of money.
But that may be changing, thanks to quiet behind-the-scenes component changes: Chinese site Expreview (via Tom's Hardware and ExtremeTech) says that a newer version of the drive manufactured in July 2021 was writing data at speeds of about 390MB per second after the drive's cache had filled up. According to Expreview, that's about half the speed of older versions of the SN550; Tom's Hardware measured speeds of about 610MB per second during a sustained write test on the original SN550, so the exact amount of performance degradation may vary. Because both the old and new versions of the SN550 use the same SSD controller, it seems likely that the slowdown is being caused by inferior NAND flash.
Modern SSDs typically pair a large amount of slower NAND flash (for capacity) and a smaller cache of faster flash memory (for the peak speeds advertised on the box). Depending on the SSD, this cache memory is designed to sustain anywhere between a few gigabytes' and a few dozen gigabytes' worth of writes before it has to fall back on the slower flash. Most of the time, you'll never notice the drive slowing down, because you're not going to fill the cache up all the way by using your computer for basic browsing, office work, or even photo editing.
The people who will notice are professional video editors who are regularly exporting, copying, and moving huge 4K video files around all day. It's normal not to get an SSD's advertised peak performance 100 percent of the time, but for a drive to perform substantially worse than it performed in thorough, professional reviews is misleading at best.
FAA to review Boeing employee reports of pressure over safety issues:
The Federal Aviation Administration is launching a broad review of how Boeing Co. employees handle safety matters on the agency's behalf after some company engineers said they face undue pressure, according to an agency letter and people familiar with the matter.
An FAA survey conducted this year found 35% of a small sample of certain Boeing employees reported problems including pressure and hurdles to transparency, according to an Aug. 19 agency letter to Boeing. Some surveyed employees, who are part of a group empowered by the agency to assist its work, said they encountered difficulties in being transparent with regulators, according to the letter, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
U.S. aviation regulators have long relied on aerospace-company employees to act on their behalf for performing certain tasks, such as signing off on certain safety assessments or approving aircraft for delivery. The problems cited by Boeing employees in the survey "indicate the environment does not support independence" of those who are empowered to act on the agency's behalf, according to the letter, which was signed by Ian Won, acting manager of the FAA's Boeing oversight office in the Seattle area.
A Boeing spokeswoman said the company takes "these matters with the utmost seriousness" and is working to bolster the independence of its employees who work on the FAA's behalf.
"We have consistently reinforced with our team that delegated authority is a privilege and that we must work every day to be trusted with the responsibility," she said. Boeing has directed that its FAA delegates "must be accorded the same respect and deference that is shown to our regulator."
The Chicago-based aerospace giant has faced setbacks in recent years related to engineering and quality issues with various commercial, military and space programs.