In the battle against the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccines have emerged as the weapon of choice. Prevention of disease is always preferable to treatment, and in this case, vaccines have proven far more targeted and effective than the few Covid therapies that have emerged so far. Several, including some that received emergency-use authorization from regulators, have lost favor or been discarded as the struggle goes on to understand the coronavirus that causes Covid and how it impacts cells, tissues an
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Video A combination of brain implants and a neural network helped a 65-year-old man paralyzed from the neck down type out text messages on a computer at 90 characters per minute, faster than any other known brain-machine interface.
The patient, referred to as T5 in a research paper published [preprint] in Nature on Wednesday, is the first person to test the technology, which was developed by a team of researchers led by America s Stanford University.
Two widgets were attached to the surface of T5’s brain; the devices featured hundreds of fine electrodes that penetrated about a millimetre into the patient’s gray matter. The test subject was then asked to imagine writing out 572 sentences over the course of three days. These text passages contained all the letters of the alphabet as well as punctuation marks. T5 was asked to represent spaces in between words using the greater than symbol, >.
Photo: Thirdman/Pexels
When the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off, everyone expected India to supply the bulk of the vaccines to poorer countries – in keeping with its image as ‘the pharmacy of the world’. India also appeared to accept this challenge quite willingly. However, the Indian government soon seemed to be treating the task of vaccinating almost 1.4 billion Indians like an elephant in the room.
The dramatic turnaround in India’s approach that soon followed – from flaunting its credentials as ‘saviour’ of the world to ‘stopping exports’ against legal agreements – triggered alarm. When and how this situation will be resolved is unclear at the moment.
Hindus appeal Alabama lawmakers to show maturity & endorse bill permitting yoga in schools
Alabama House Education Policy Committee has reportedly approved a bill, which if enacted, would allow yoga to be offered to grades K-12 in Alabama public schools, which has been reportedly prohibited since 1993.
Distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada today, urged Alabama state legislators to wake up to the needs of Alabama pupils and support introduction of multi-beneficial yoga in schools. Somebody needed to remind Alabama State Department of Education that we lived in 21
st century now.
Many Alabama public universities and city governments had already offered yoga and many Alabama churches had hosted yoga classes; reports suggest. Yoga was urgently needed to be incorporated in the lives of Alabama’s students; Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, stated.
Scientific American
Will COVID Force Public Health to Confront America’s Epic Inequality?
In California’s San Joaquin Valley, some researchers are turning political to address the social determinants of health
By:
Nature, The Smithsonian, Nova/PBS and other outlets.
Nature, The Smithsonian, Nova/PBS and other outlets.
On a hazy day in November, Hardeep Singh received a text message from the COVID-19 testing system at Foster Farms poultry company saying that his mother had tested positive for the coronavirus.
He got the alert because his mother, a 63-year-old line worker at one of the company’s meat-packing plants in California’s San Joaquin Valley, doesn’t speak English and doesn’t own a smartphone.