• IBM Detects Hacking Ploy to Target COVID Vaccine Supply

    Researchers from technology giant IBM say hackers have tried to collect information on the global initiative for distributing coronavirus vaccine to developing countries. They said a nation state appeared to be involved.

  • CDC Panel Moves Health Workers, Nursing Home Residents to Front of COVID Vaccine Line

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory group, in an emergency meeting Monday, approved an interim recommendation for who should receive the first COVID-19 vaccine doses once authorized, which puts healthcare workers and nursing home residents at the front of the line.

  • Britain Becomes First Nation to Approve Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine

    Britain has given emergency approval to a new COVID-19 vaccine developed by U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, becoming the world’s first western nation ready to begin mass inoculations against a disease that has sickened nearly 64 million people worldwide, including more than 1.4 million deaths.

  • Valuing “Natural Capital” Vital to Avoid Next Pandemic

    Pandemics will emerge more often, kill more people than COVID-19 and do even more damage to the world economy unless urgent steps are taken to address risk drivers such as deforestation, warns a major new report on biodiversity and pandemics.

  • New Cyberattack Tricks Scientists into Making Dangerous Toxins, Synthetic Viruses

    An end-to-end cyber-biological attack, in which unwitting biologists may be tricked into generating dangerous toxins in their labs, has been discovered by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev cyber-researchers. It is currently believed that a criminal needs to have physical contact with a dangerous substance to produce and deliver it. However, malware could easily replace a short sub-string of the DNA on a bioengineer’s computer so that they unintentionally create a toxin producing sequence.

  • Israeli locust slayers train Ethiopians to save crops

    The enemies are huge armies of desert locusts destroying farm and grazing lands across nine East African countries. In Ethiopia alone, the locusts have conquered three million acres since January. Experts from Israel bring equipment and knowhow enabling Ethiopian farmers to protect their fields from deadly desert locust swarms.

  • Here's How the Three COVID-19 Vaccines Compare

    With pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca’s announcement Monday that its vaccine successfully prevented coronavirus infection, three candidates appear to be promising vital tools to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic. However, scientists caution that all they know about these vaccines is what the companies have said in press releases. Like movie trailers, “They provide some exciting scenes but leave a lot unsaid. You have to go see the whole movie,” said Vanderbilt University infectious diseases professor William Schaffner.

  • Face Masks Cut Disease Spread in the Lab, but Have Less Impact in the Community. We Need to Know Why

    In controlled laboratory situations, face masks appear to do a good job of reducing the spread of coronavirus (at least in hamsters) and other respiratory viruses. However, evidence shows mask-wearing policies seem to have had much less impact on the community spread of COVID-19. Why this gap between the effectiveness in the lab and the effectiveness seen in the community? The real world is more complex than a controlled laboratory situation. The right people need to wear the right mask, in the right way, at the right times and places.

  • Deep Learning in the Emergency Department

    Using a deep-learning model designed for high-dimensional data, researchers have shown that it is possible to predict emergency department overcrowding from complex hospital records. This application of the “Variational AutoEncoder” deep-learning model is an example of how machine learning can be used to interpret and extract meaning from difficult data sets that are too voluminous or complex for humans to decipher.

  • Landmark Danish Study Shows Face Masks Have No Significant Effect

    Do face masks work? Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson write that a just-published study reports the results of a trial in Denmark – a study which hopes to answer that very question. “In the end, there was no statistically significant difference between those who wore masks and those who did not when it came to being infected by Covid-19,” they write.

  • Groundbreaking Research on Chlorine Spread

    Chlorine can kill in minutes if inhaled in high concentration. Since 2010, DHS S&T led a project, called Jack Rabbit, aiming to improve ways to detect and deal with chlorine spread. Recent events highlight the need for responders to be prepared with the best information possible for this type of hazard.

  • U.S. COVID-19 Crisis Deepens as Deaths Top 250,000

    As COVID-19 deaths topped 250,000 yesterday, the White House coronavirus task force signaled that the nation’s pandemic situation is worsening, with more overrun hospitals and deaths potentially approaching 2,000 a day in the lead-up to Christmas—unless strong mitigation measures are taken. Meanwhile, the global COVID-19 total topped 56 million yesterday, as Europe’s cases slowed but its deaths rose.

  • Questions Persist over Face Mask Efficacy

    Face masks have become the ubiquitous symbol of a pandemic that has sickened 35 million people and killed more than 1 million. For the variety of masks in use by the public, the data are messy, disparate, and often hastily assembled. On top of that, the use of masks has been accompanied by a divisive political discourse. A new study finds that “the recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in mask wearers in a setting where social distancing and other public health measures were in effect.”

  • The Strategic Stockpile Failed; Experts Propose New Approach to Emergency Preparedness

    A new analysis of the United States government’s response to COVID-19 highlights myriad problems with an approach that relied, in large part, on international supply chains and the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). A panel of academic and military experts is instead calling for a more dynamic, flexible approach to emergency preparedness at the national level.

  • Putting Games to Work in the Battle Against COVID-19

    While video games often give us a way to explore other worlds, they can also help us learn more about our own — including how to navigate a pandemic. That was the premise underlying “Jamming the Curve,” a competition that enlisted over 400 independent video game developers around the world to develop concepts for games that reflect the real-world dynamics of COVID-19.