EurekAlert: Public mobility, social media attention in response to COVID-19 in Sweden, Denmark. “Denmark was one of the first countries to enforce lockdown to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and subsequent gradual reopening, whereas Sweden has had few restrictions, largely limited to public recommendations. Researchers assessed public mobility and social media attention associated with COVID-19 […]
ABC News: Kizzmekia Corbett, an African American woman, is praised as key scientist behind COVID-19 vaccine. “Corbett is an expert on the front lines of the global race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, and someone who will go down in history as one of the key players in developing the science that could end the pandemic. […]
Tel Aviv University: LED lights found to kill coronavirus: Global first in fight against COVID-19. “Researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) have proven that the coronavirus can be killed efficiently, quickly, and cheaply using ultraviolet (UV) light-emitting diodes (UV-LEDs). They believe that the UV-LED technology will soon be available for private and commercial use.”
NHK World Japan: Japanese scale measures stress of COVID-19 workers. “A group of researchers in Japan has developed a tool to detect mental distress in medical workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Medical workers are said to be at high risk of developing mental health problems due to fears of coronavirus infection and social stigma.”
Vox EU: “Covid Economics”: A new kind of publication. “From early March, it became clear that economists around the world, like everyone else, were mesmerised by the Covid-19 pandemic and trying to make sense of the unfolding events. This column describes how the tradition of pre-prints in physics and the medical sciences inspired the creation […]
Reuters: Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research – documents. “Alphabet Inc’s Google this year moved to tighten control over its scientists’ papers by launching a ‘sensitive topics’ review, and in at least three cases requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light, according to internal communications […]
BloombergQuint: Google Waives $1.5 Billion DeepMind Loan as AI Costs Mount. “Alphabet Inc.’s Google waived a 1.1 billion-pound loan ($1.5 billion) to DeepMind Technologies Ltd. in 2019 after the U.K.-based artificial intelligence lab continued to ramp up the scale of its research and development. Revenue jumped 158% in 2019, DeepMind said in a financial filing […]
Washington Post: A gamble pays off in ‘spectacular success’: How the leading coronavirus vaccines made it to the finish line. “The world’s hopes have weighed heavily on the quest to develop coronavirus vaccines, with an especially intense focus on two front-runners: one from Moderna, the other from Pfizer and BioNTech. Both were a speedy but […]
Futurism: Scientists Unimpressed By Google’s Protein Folding Algorithm. “While critical scientists don’t diminish the importance of DeepMind’s achievement, they do question whether AlphaFold 2 will actually provide a useful tool to researchers like DeepMind claims. DeepMinds’ AlphaFold 2 algorithm scored higher at the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition, which tests potential solutions to […]
EurekAlert: Immediate detection of airborne viruses with a disposable kit!. “The KIST-GIST collaborative research team developed an integrated sampling/monitoring platform that uses a disposable kit to easily collect and detect airborne viruses on-site. The disposable virus sampling/monitoring kit developed by the team is similar to the pregnancy test kit, and enables completion of both sampling […]
Chemistry World: Nature journals set to offer all authors open access route in 2021 – for a price. “In a significant policy shift, Nature and its 32 sister journals will give authors the chance to make their work free to read immediately after publication from January 2021. The move was announced by Springer Nature, the […]
Wired: The AstraZeneca Covid Vaccine Data Isn’t Up to Snuff. “The problems start with the fact that Monday’s announcement did not present results from a single, large-scale, Phase 3 clinical trial, as was the case for earlier bulletins about the BNT-Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Instead, Oxford-AstraZeneca’s data came out of two separate studies: one in […]
BBC: One of biology’s biggest mysteries ‘largely solved’ by AI. “One of biology’s biggest mysteries has been solved using artificial intelligence, experts have announced. Predicting how a protein folds into a unique three-dimensional shape has puzzled scientists for half a century. London-based AI lab, DeepMind, has largely cracked the problem, say the organisers of a […]
Opportunity Insight: The Economic Impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data. “We build a publicly available database that tracks economic activity at a granular level in real time using anonymized data from private companies. We report daily statistics on consumer spending, business revenues, employment rates, and other key […]