Lifeboat Foundation

The mayor of Oakland, California, on Tuesday announced a privately funded program that will give low-income families of color in the city $500 per month with no rules on how they can spend it.

The program is the latest experiment with a “guaranteed income,” the idea that giving low-income individuals a regular, monthly stipend helps ease the stresses of poverty and results in better health and upward economic mobility.”

Alan DeRossett.

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Importance Numerous prognostic models of suicide risk have been published, but few have been implemented outside of integrated managed care systems.

Objective To evaluate performance of a suicide attempt risk prediction model implemented in a vendor-supplied electronic health record to predict subsequent suicidal ideation and suicide attempt.

Design, Setting, and Participants This observational cohort study evaluated implementation of a suicide attempt prediction model in live clinical systems without alerting. The cohort comprised patients seen for any reason in adult inpatient, emergency department, and ambulatory surgery settings at an academic medical center in the mid-South from June 2019 to April 2020.

From microwave ovens to Wi-Fi connections, the radio waves that permeate the environment are not just signals of energy consumed but are also sources of energy themselves. An international team of researchers, led by Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, has developed a way to harvest energy from radio waves to power wearable devices.

The researchers recently published their method in Materials Today Physics.

According to Cheng, current energy sources for wearable health-monitoring devices have their place in powering sensor devices, but each has its setbacks. Solar power, for example, can only harvest energy when exposed to the sun. A self-powered triboelectric device can only harvest energy when the body is in motion.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WHEC) — Monroe County Public Health Commissioner Dr. Michael Mendoza Tuesday announced new COVID-19 variants have been found in Monroe County.

Mendoza announced that two cases of the UK variant and a small sample of the California variant were found in Monroe County in some older cases from February.

Wiesendanger points out that unlike SARS and MERS, no intermediate host between bats and humans has been found more than a year since the start of the pandemic. Thus far, there is no evidence for the zoonotic theory to explain the outbreak.

Indeed, during the joint China-WHO report issued on Feb. 9, Liang Wannian, head of the Chinese National Health Commission’s Expert Panel of COVID-19 Response, stated that 50000 samples of wild animals from 300 different species (including bats) as well as 11000 farm animals in 31 Chinese provinces — taken between November 2019 and March 2020 — had all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19.

Continue reading “German scientist says 99.9% chance coronavirus leaked from Wuhan lab” »

It has long been understood that a parent’s DNA is the principal determinant of health and disease in offspring. Yet inheritance via DNA is only part of the story; a father’s lifestyle such as diet, being overweight and stress levels have been linked to health consequences for his offspring. This occurs through the epigenome—heritable biochemical marks associated with the DNA and proteins that bind it. But how the information is transmitted at fertilization along with the exact mechanisms and molecules in sperm that are involved in this process has been unclear until now.

A new study from McGill, published recently in Developmental Cell, has made a significant advance in the field by identifying how environmental information is transmitted by non-DNA molecules in the sperm. It is a discovery that advances scientific understanding of the heredity of paternal life experiences and potentially opens new avenues for studying disease transmission and prevention.

Sherpa, a startup from Bilbao, Spain that was an early mover in building a voice-based digital assistant and predictive search for Spanish-speaking audiences, has raised some more funding to double down on a newer focus for the startup: building out privacy-first AI services for enterprise customers.

The company has closed $8.5 million, funding that Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, Sherpa’s founder and CEO, said it will be using to continue building out a privacy-focused machine learning platform based on a federated learning model alongside its existing conversational AI and search services. Early users of the service have included the Spanish public health services, which were using the platform to analyse information about COVID-19 cases to predict demand and capacity in emergency rooms around the country.

Continue reading “Sherpa raises $8.5M to expand from conversational AI to B2B privacy-first federated learning services” »

Some experts have chimed in that tempering social distancing recommendations could be an important step to getting children back into classrooms. Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, suggested in a tweet that the C.D.C. guidance may be changing, and that is “good. Because 6 ft doesn’t protect teachers. But it does keep kids out of school.”

“Want to open schools safely? Masks. Ventilation. Testing. Vaccinating teachers/staff. That’s the list,” Dr. Jha tweeted.

The new study, published March 10, compared the incidence rates of coronavirus cases among students and staff in Massachusetts school districts that required at least six feet of separation with those that required only three feet of distance, and found no statistically significant differences in infection rates among staff members or students.

The Strait of Gibraltar is featured in this false-color image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on October 282020. Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel missions (2020), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The Strait of Gibraltar connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean and separates southernmost Spain from northernmost Africa. The channel is 58 km long and narrows to 13 km in width between Point Marroquí (Spain) and Point Cires (Morocco). Ferries and vessels can be seen traveling across the strait and crossing between the two continents.

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