viruses – Newswire Report

The Next Generation of Batteries Could Be Built by Viruses

February 27, 2020February 27, 2020 NewsEditorbatteries, biotech, materials science, viruses

In 2009, MIT bioengineering professor Angela Belcher traveled to the White House to demo a small battery for President Barack Obama, who was just two months into his first term in office. There aren’t many batteries that can get an audience with the leader of the free world, but this wasn’t your everyday power pouch. Belcher had used viruses to assemble a lithium-ion battery’s positive and negative electrodes, an engineering breakthrough that promised to reduce the toxicity of the battery manufacturing process and boost their performance. Obama was preparing to…

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Wuhan Coronavirus ‘Super-Spreaders’ Could Be Wildcards

February 2, 2020February 2, 2020 NewsEditorcoronavirus, epidemics, public health, viruses

Stopping the spread of a rapidly emerging disease takes masterful medical detective work, including tracing the people who have been infected and figuring out their web of contacts, steps that are vital to understanding how it’s being transmitted. US public health officials are following those trails to quickly detect new cases of the Wuhan coronavirus, including the report on Thursday of a sixth US infection—the husband of a woman who became ill after traveling from China back home to Chicago—which was followed by a seventh, in California, on Friday. Yet…

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Scientists Predict Wuhan’s Outbreak Will Get Much Worse

January 26, 2020January 26, 2020 NewsEditorChina, outbreak, public health, viruses

As more data on the new coronavirus circulating in China emerges, it’s becoming clear that whatever the country is experiencing now—dozens of deaths, hundreds of people hospitalized, cities of millions quarantined—is just the tip of the outbreak. On Friday, a team of researchers based in the UK and US up to 729. Using case data scraped from official reports, a team led by Jonathan Read at Lancaster University plotted a temporal map of the coronavirus’s spread, starting on January 1, when local authorities closed the meat-and-animal market where the virus…

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An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

January 26, 2020January 26, 2020 NewsEditorartificial intelligence, Data, epidemiology, public health, viruses

On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors’ exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31. Related Stories Snakes?! The Slippery Truth of a…