Is Covid part of superpower germ warfare? Top doctor admits US funded Wuhan virus project
In a Senate hearing late last month, top doctor Anthony Fauci told lawmakers the US granted $600,000 in funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology over a five-year period, but documents provided by the Department of Health and Human Services Friday show the actual number was a third higher. Reports...
WHO approves a ‘weak’ Chinese vaccine for emergency use against coronavirus
The World Health Organization (WHO) has approved a second Chinese vaccine for emergency use. CoronaVac was found to be 51 per cent effective at preventing Covid-19 in late-stage trials and researchers say it will be key to curbing the pandemic. This overall protection is lower than that provided by the...
When Google’s photo organising service tagged Blacks as ‘gorillas’ it walked AI into Hall of Shame
When a person dies in a car crash in the US, data on the incident is typically reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Federal law requires that civilian airplane pilots notify the National Transportation Safety Board of in-flight fires and some other incidents. The grim registries are intended...
Some Americans refuse to see Covid as a threat, suspect vaccines and institutions
America’s vaccine campaign has collapsed from its previous highs. While at one point in mid-April more than three million people received the shot each day, now only around 1.2 million are – a rate that’s less than half of what it was at the peak. So, the US might not...
NASA sends two spacecraft to Venus roughly 30 years since its last mission
NASA had a surprise in store for planetary scientists on Thursday morning. During a “State of NASA” briefing, the agency announced that roiling, toxic Venus will be the target of the next two missions in its highly competitive Discovery programme. “These two sister missions, both aimed to understand how Venus...
‘Deepfake’ maps that will show you’re in London, not Nairobi, coming soon
Satellite images showing the expansion of large detention camps in Xinjiang, China, between 2016 and 2018 provided some of the strongest evidence of a government crackdown on more than a million Muslims, triggering international condemnation and sanctions. Other aerial images – of nuclear installations in Iran and missile sites in...
Sexism? Why biomedical research focuses on male rats, mice hormones only
Picture a person having a heart attack – what do you see? Mostly likely a man, looking sweaty and short of breath, clutching his arm or chest in pain. This canonical image has been so deeply impressed into our minds that it may be hard to believe heart attacks could...
Facemask: How condom, car seatbelts and tuberculosis experience eased the stigma
Early in the HIV-Aids epidemic in the 1980s, public-health officials faced a major challenge in trying to slow the spread of the virus. The problem wasn’t necessarily convincing people that a physical barrier – in this case, a condom – could prevent infection. “I don’t think the issue was so...
When cool old-school computers prove too good to die, in-demand and impractical to retire
Sometimes cool old-school IT refuses to die, in demand and impractical to retire Some 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory – a solar-monitoring satellite launched in 2010 – bristles with high-tech sensors. Yet one of the Earth-bound systems that supports those sensors was, until 2015, decidedly old-school....
Digital blackout: Internet access determines access to Covid vaccine in India
India’s deadly coronavirus second wave has underscored a stark digital divide determining who has better access to vaccines and healthcare, as surging caseloads expose shortfalls and overwhelm hospitals. Onerous online procedures have turned vaccine access into an exclusionary, often lottery-like process in a country where about half the population lacks...
