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Gamers, bitcoin "miners" and companies large and small have teamed up for an unprecedented data-crunching effort that aims to harness idle computing power to accelerate research for a coronavirus treatment. The project led by computational biologists has effectively created the world's most powerful supercomputer that can handle trillions of calculations needed to understand the structure of the virus. More than 400,000 users downloaded the application in the past two weeks from "Folding@Home," according to director Greg Bowman, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Washington University in St. Louis, where the project is based.

The United States says it will share any vaccine breakthroughs with the world, but German officials appeared rattled by its reported overture to a biotech firm. BERLIN — The Trump administration attempted to persuade a German firm developing a possible vaccine for coronavirus to move its research work to the United States, German officials said, raising fears in Berlin that President Trump was trying to assure that any inoculation would be available first, and perhaps exclusively, in the United States.

As the coronavirus threat grows, we are all hoping to limit its spread, or even better, invent a vaccine. Yet, at the very same time we need new treatments some people are proposing to abandon decades of proven success in innovation policy. Fortunately, there is widespread support and mounting evidence in favor of keeping the pro-innovation approach that has always defined the American spirit. The American bio-pharmaceutical industry leads the world in innovation. Americans have access to newer treatments, sooner. And that's not all. A recent report highlighted that sector of our economy supports more than 4 million American. A...

Last month a professor at Harvard University was arrested for failing to disclose that he’d been receiving $50,000 per month from China. Dr. Charles Lieber had been recruited by something called the Thousand Talents Plan which pays foreign experts to share their knowledge at Chinese universities. However, professors are not allowed to accept research grants from federal agencies while also teaching in China. Lieber allegedly hid his China connections when applying for grants from the National Institutes of Health. Today, a professor in Tennessee has been charged for hiding similar connections to China: Anming Hu, an associate professor in...

An Instagram account that was impersonating that of a U.S. government news agency has been closed down after it was used to spread misinformation about the unfolding situation in the Middle East. The account wrongly claimed that the daughter of slain Iran Gen. Qassem Soleimani is a U.S. citizen. -------------------------- CHICAGO (AP) — An Instagram account masquerading as a U.S. government news agency was used to promote misinformation about potential fallout from America's targeted killing last week of Iran’s top general. The fraudulent Instagram account had nearly a half-million followers and used the name as well as logo of the...

A year ago, Secret Service Special Agent Rod Wellman never thought he’d be tapering for a 100K race. The distance was never something he thought would cross his path. He thought the same thing about lung cancer. Yet, on October 4, 2018, Wellman found himself at an urgent care center for a cough that hadn’t gone away after several weeks. Some scans and X-rays revealed the cause. “I’ve never been that sick before,” Wellman told Runner’s World. “I thought it was just a chest cold. Then, they told me I had stage 4 cancer in my lungs.” By the time...

If I had known, 20 years ago, that my side in the ideological wars over gender and sex was going to win so decisively, I would have been ecstatic. Back then, I spent many evenings at the pub or at dinner parties debating gender and identity with other graduate students; or, really, anyone who would listen—my mother-in-law, my relatives, or just a random person unlucky enough to be in my presence. I insisted that there was no such thing as sex. And I knew it. I just knew it. Because I was a gender historian. This was, in the 1990s,...

China’s efforts to lure its scientists back from overseas institutions have been paying off militarily, with more than a little help from the United States. Military projects they have been involved in include China’s development of hypersonic weapons capable of penetrating missile-defence systems and the design of new submarines able to patrol quietly along the US west coast, researchers familiar with the programmes told the South China Morning Post. For more than a decade, China has been ramping up efforts to lure back talented scientists working at laboratories in the US linked to America’s nuclear weapons programme and other military...

.... Doctors worried the disease may have mutated, and hoped to study her brain after her passing to find out more. When the time came though, her neurologist couldn’t accept the body. Her son hoped reaching out to other donation facilities could lead to the same result. Days later, he received a wooden box with his mother’s information and an ID number. Inside, he was told, was a majority of her ashes. Years went by before Stauffer learned what he was told, wasn’t the case. “She was then supposedly strapped in a chair on some sort of apparatus, and a...

The dossier on cancer researcher Wu Xifeng was thick with intrigue, if hardly the stuff of a spy thriller. It contained findings that she’d im­properly shared confi­den­tial information and accepted a half-dozen advisory roles at medical institutions in China. She might have weathered those allegations, but for a larger aspersion that was far more problematic: she was branded an oncological double agent. In recent decades, cancer research has become increasingly globalised, with scientists around the world pooling data and ideas to jointly study a disease that kills almost 10 million people a year. International collaborations are an intrinsic part of...

President Donald Trump is canceling a contract that provides government funding to the University of California, San Francisco for research that issues fetal tissue harvested from elective abortions. The Trump administration first focused its sights on the contract this past September, with the National Institute of Health (NIH) warning UCSF that its $2 million annual contract for fetal tissue research would be curtailed to 90 days and possibly canceled altogether. Senior administration officials told The Daily Caller that the contract will be officially terminated Wednesday. The cancelation stems from a 9-month U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) review...

In 2003, the anthropologist Duana Fullwiley spent six months observing a team of biomedical research scientists. The team wanted to find out whether genetic variation could affect how different people respond to drugs, and to do so, they recruited a group of racially and ethnically diverse research subjects. They were a diverse team themselves, with good intentions to address a worthy problem—it’s well known that different races suffer from health problems at different rates and can respond differently to treatments. If they could trace these discrepancies to genetic differences between races, the team reasoned, they could explain, and perhaps start...

Bazillions of adult Game of Thrones fans may currently be preoccupied with dragons, and the mother of dragons and that giant dragon-killing-dart machine — but one girl in New Zealand is trying to get serious about the real-life study of dragons. So much so that the 11-year-old recently tried to tempt Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern into launching a dragon research program, with a little bit of telekinesis studies on the side. Unfortunately, the prime minister could not be bought. She said it was a no-go.

Using a mouse model of pancreatic cancer, researchers have zoomed in on a single gene that stopped aggressive pancreatic cancer from developing when the scientists removed it. holding the DNA concept illustration New research sheds light on the genetic drivers behind pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is an aggressive form of cancer that tends to be diagnosed quite late and often resists treatment. According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Some estimates predict that by 2020, pancreatic cancer will become the second leading cause of death. The...

Being obese is linked to a significantly higher chance of serious disease and early death than being a healthy weight, research on more than 2.8 million adults suggests. The chance of suffering serious illness goes up with increasing weight gain, experts analysing health, death and sickness data from UK adults found. How much does the risk increase as your BMI rises? Presented at the European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Glasgow, the study found that people with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 to 35 were at 70% higher risk of developing heart failure than their healthy weight peers....

The prestige of America’s elite universities is rapidly deflating, as scandals reveal them to be far from disinterested seekers of the truth and shapers of the minds of the meritocratically-selected future leaders. The hard truth is that they are big businesses, as self-interested and narrow-minded as any corporation, but harder to take because of all the pretensions. The admissions scandals unfolding, with more indictments promised, is but one pillar of elite academic prestige that is getting very shaky. Equally if not more serious is the problem of research fraud, spurred by the availability of gigantic research grants, mostly from...

The number of murders by extremist individuals has dropped significantly under POTUS Donald Trump compared to the final two years Barack Obama was president, according to a new study by the Anti-Defamation League. “In 2018, domestic extremists killed at least 50 people in the U.S., a sharp increase from the 37 extremist-related murders documented in 2017, though still lower than the totals for 2015 (70) and 2016 (72),” the ADL’s Center on Extremism reported. That said, the 50 deaths recorded last year did mark the fourth-deadliest on record for acts of domestic extremism, the center noted. Two major incidents in...

.............The broad outlines of Bernie’s long-running infatuation with all things Soviet Russian are available to diligent researchers. We know Bernie went to Moscow for his honeymoon. This is sort of passed over and laughed off by his supporters, but it should not be. It that era it was considered a signature event in the life of a dedicated American communist. Something many American communists looked forward to as a culmination of their connections with the movement. This was frequently accompanies by other highly symbolic gestures, like getting married in a Red Dress, or having the wedding ceremony itself in the...

WASHINGTON, DC — Alzheimer’s Disease [AD] has an insidiously disproportionate effect on senior citizens and their families. Surveys conducted over the past several years show that a diagnosis of AD sparks terror in the hearts of patients, families and friends, more so than just about any other fatal or chronic illness, according to the Association of Mature American Citizens. In fact, a Marist Poll conducted in 2012 concluded that Alzheimer’s was America’s most feared illness. And, says AMAC, it still is. The association’s president, Dan Weber, says that for patients, perhaps it is “the idea of losing their identity and...

An academic has challenged a decision by Bath Spa University to refuse him permission to research trans regret. Psychotherapist James Caspian wanted to study people who had undergone “sex-change” operations only to later regret their decision and seek to reverse their transition. His research proposal was rejected by the university for being “politically incorrect.” Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, he said, “I was shocked, but immediately knew I was in the eye of a storm.” Caspian believes that his case demonstrates that the fear and sensitivity surrounding trans issues is stifling public debate and preventing them from being “critically examined.”