• Heritable Genome Editing Not Yet Ready to Be Tried Safely and Effectively in Humans

    Human embryos whose genomes have been edited should not be used to create a pregnancy until it is established that precise genomic changes can be made reliably without introducing undesired changes — a criterion that has not yet been met by any genome editing technology, says a new scientific report.

  • Uniform Framework for Quantifying Disaster-Related Deaths, Illness

    To more accurately quantify disaster-related deaths, injuries, and illnesses, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies supporting disaster response should adopt a uniform national framework of data collection approaches and methods for distinguishing direct from indirect disaster deaths, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences.

  • How China Ramped Up Disinformation Efforts During the Pandemic

    China once shied away from the aggressive, conspiratorial type of disinformation favored by Russia, but Beijing has increased its manipulation of information as well as disinformation efforts around COVID-19. The goal of manipulating factual information and spreading disinformation—or willfully false information— is to distract from the origins of the virus, highlight the failures of the United States, damage democracies, and promote China as a global leader. But its strategies have had mixed results.

  • Pharmaceutical Giant AstraZeneca Halts COVID-19 Vaccine Trial

    British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant Astra-Zeneca has paused large-scale global trials of its COVID-19 vaccine because a volunteer participant became ill after receiving the experimental drug. The company issued a statement Tuesday saying the pause in testing is a “routine action, which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials.” The chief executive officers of the world’s nine leading drug companies issued a statement promising they would not submit for approval any vaccine before the vaccine is demonstrated to be safe and effective through a Phase 3 clinical studies. The unusual joint pledge was aimed at alleviating growing fears by health experts that pharmaceutical companies are under considerable political pressure to quickly develop and introduce a COVID-19 vaccine.

  • The Pandemic Has Revealed the Cracks in U.S. Manufacturing: Here’s How to Fix Them

    The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed glaring deficiencies in the U.S. manufacturing sector’s ability to provide necessary products – especially amidst a crisis. Globalization is at the heart of the problem. With heavy reliance on global supply chains and foreign producers, the pandemic has interrupted shipping of parts and materials to nearly 75% of U.S. companies. Decades of “offshoring” domestic manufacturing to other countries have led the U.S. to the current crisis. It has seriously damaged the nation’s industrial base, increased income inequality and caused stagnation in U.S. living standards. How the U.S. responds will determine the long-term health and prosperity of the nation.

  • Better Strategy to Protect U.S. Agricultural Sector

    The agriculture sector in the United States accounts for more than 5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (about a trillion dollars) and provides jobs for more than 10 percent of U.S. workforce, and threats to the agricultural sectors. Agriculture impacts more than just the food provided for the family dinner. It’s a part of forestry, fishing, food and beverages for restaurants, textile, and leather products. In the past, biological weapons (BW) attacks were typically considered with the framework of anti-personnel attacks. Experts say that state-actors or terrorists could wreak havoc – and misery – on millions of Americans by launching attacks on the U.S. agricultural sector.

  • COVID-19 Revealing the Impact of Disinformation on Society

    The COVID-19 pandemic has provided new evidence of the impact of disinformation on people’s behavior, according to a new report, which examines the causes and consequences of disinformation. The researchers also argue there has been too much focus on blaming social media for spreading false content, whist neglecting the spread of misleading content in traditional media by political actors.

  • Health Officials Call on U.S. Government to Reverse COVID-19 Test Guidelines

    Public health departments throughout the United States are calling on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reverse changes the federal agency recently made to its public coronavirus testing guidelines. Earlier in the CDC announced that it would recommend stopping testing people who have been exposed to the virus but are asymptomatic.

  • Warming May Force Some Favorite Produce Crops to Get a Move On

    Record drought and heat have some farmers worried about where and when crops can be grown in the future, even in California where unprecedented microclimate diversity creates ideal growing conditions for many of the most popular items in America’s grocery stores Warmer California temperatures by mid-century will be too hot for some crops, just right for others.

  • Pandemic Concerns and 2020 Election: Concerns Vary by Race, Education, Party Affiliation

    Although most voters say they believe that voting will be safe and that their ballot will be counted despite the coronavirus pandemic, those who question election safety and some who question election integrity appear less likely to vote, according to a new RAND survey. In addition, people who identify as Republicans are more likely to express concerns about the integrity of the 2020 elections, while Democrats are more likely to be concerned about safety—underscoring the need for election officials to communicate to the public about both issues.

  • Gunshot Injuries in California Drop, but Percentage of Firearm Death Goes Up

    Gun-violence research experts say that despite a significant drop in firearm injuries in recent years in California, there has been a substantial increase in the state’s overall death rate among those wounded by firearms. “We found that the number of nonfatal firearm injuries in California decreased over an 11-year period, primarily due to a drop in firearm assaults,” said Sarabeth Spitzer, lead author and a UC Davis research intern at the time of the study. “However, the lethality of those and other firearm injuries did not go down. In fact, it went up.”

  • New Technique to Prevent Medical Imaging Cyberthreats

    Complex medical devices such as CT (computed tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and ultrasound machines are controlled by instructions sent from a host PC. Abnormal or anomalous instructions introduce many potentially harmful threats to patients, such as radiation overexposure, manipulation of device components or functional manipulation of medical images. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have developed a new artificial intelligence technique that will protect medical devices from malicious operating instructions in a cyberattack as well as other human and system errors.

  • Name Your Poison: Some of the Exotic Toxins Which Fell Kremlin Foes

    The poisoning last Thursday by Kremlin operatives of Alexey Navalny, one of the leaders of the Russian opposition (he is now fighting for his life in a German hospital) is reminiscent of dozens of other such poisonings of opponents and critics of the Russian (and, before that, Soviet) regimes. Poisoning has been the Russian secret services’ preferred method of dealing with irritating critics, and these services have at their disposal a large and sophisticated laboratory — alternatively known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and Kamera (which means “The Cell” in Russian) – where ever more exotic toxins are being developed for use against regime opponents and critics.

  • Gaps in Early Surveillance Led to Record-Breaking U.S. Trajectory: Study

    As the United States exceeds 5 million reported coronavirus cases — the world’s first country to do so — epidemiologists have pinpointed what helped to set the country on this path. New research estimates that more than 100,000 people were already infected with COVID-19 by early March — when only 1,514 cases and 39 deaths had been officially reported and before a national emergency was declared.

  • FDA OKs Use of Convalescent Plasma for COVID-19

    On Sunday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it has approved plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients to be used as a hospital-based treatment for the novel coronavirus under an emergency use authorization (EUA). In a White House press conference, President Trump and FDA director Stephen Hahn both claimed that treatment with convalescent plasma “reduced mortality in hospitalized patients by 35%,” but the FDA’s own press release was much more circumspect. Many scientists pointed out that the Mayo Clinic study cited by both Trump and Hahn clearly stated that 3.2 people out of 100—not 35—would be saved by the administration of convalescent plasma, and that even to achieve this result, the plasma must be administered within three days of infection. Still, even without the hype, and subject to additional controlled, randomized clinical trials, scientists say, this is welcome news.